“I can’t pay no doctor bills, But whitey’s on the moon. Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still, While whitey’s on the moon. The man just upped my rent last night, Cause whitey’s on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights but whitey’s on the moon.”

These are just a few lines from Gil Scott-Heron’s famous spoken word poem from 1970, Whitey on the Moon, but the words ring just as true today as they did then. Scott-Heron’s poem was a direct criticism of a U.S. government that would rather spend billions to send astronauts to the moon as it did with Apollo 11 Moon Landing mission instead of redirecting that spending to more “terrestrial” matters such as the constant struggles of the working class and especially the struggles of working-class African Americans. Those same critiques feel just as relevant today to the most recent example of exorbitant spacefare spending, Artemis II. 

For those who are unaware, Artemis II is a recent mission conducted by NASA that saw a crew of four astronauts complete a lunar flyby with the express purpose of testing out new launch technologies and other systems for spaceflight systems and navigation. All of this is part of the larger mission of the Artemis Program as a whole which seeks to bring humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972. While it is certainly a scientific marvel, I can’t help but ask what is the actual point of dedicating an entire program to this seemingly redundant task? A program that since 2012 has cost upwards of $93 billion, while many Americans continue to grapple with poverty, live paycheck to paycheck, face homelessness, struggle with decades worth of debt, and are continuously facing the rising cost of goods as wealth disparity continues to grow. To me this is reflective of a government and its agencies that would rather do frivolous spending for the sake of national ego-stroking than actually addressing the concerns and needs of those who make this country function: the working class. 

Let me be clear, I think space exploration is fascinating and certainly could be worthy of investment, but for it to take priority over the actual struggles and issues faced by working-class Americans is a complete joke. Rather than using those billions to make meaningful changes on the Artemis program to make actual meaningful material changes for the lives of all Americans, we instead get a trip that to me is as “significant” as when the a flight by Blue Origin took Jeff Bezos and a bunch of other wealthy celebrity leaches up for a joyride in space. The only difference is that at least the crew of Artemis II are respectable. 

Both as Americans and as members of the global community, the world is continuously faced with war, genocide, exploitation, poverty, imperialism, and all types of environmental degradation and destruction imaginable. There is so much that the world is constantly faced with and all of it demands serious attention and resources to have any chance of even somewhat addressing these issues but as we see with the Artemis program, the U.S. government would rather continue to build up programs whose benefits would realistically only be accessible to the wealthy few who continue to hollow out this country. Space exploration is an incredible achievement but we all need to remember that when whitey’s on the moon, we’ll still be here on Earth to face all the struggles that our government neglects to even consider from their ivory towers and their soon-to-be built ivory space stations.