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Sure, NASA is set to reduce its workforce by at least 2,145 employees, most of them senior-level and with expertise that will be extremely hard to replace. Sure, Sean Duffy, the former Real World cast member currently serving as secretary of transportation (which seems like a more-than-full-time job already) is now also the interim head of NASA. Sure, the Trump budget aims to slash NASA’s funding to the level it was several years before we sent anyone to the moon. The Senate is trying to preserve the budget, but—must it? It’s okay! We didn’t need to go to space again anyway! What’s in space? Nothing. Void, vacuum, Laika’s vengeful ghost, dust, gas, rocks, old Voyagers, a couple of gold records, thousands of Starlink satellites blotting out the view of the stars. It’s not like we haven’t been up there before. Going to space is much too ’60s. The whole theme of the Trump administration is undoing things we did in the 1960s, such as “end polio” and “enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.”

To anyone who says, “I don’t think a former reality-TV star should be in charge of NASA,” I say: Why does NASA deserve any better than the rest of the country?

Indeed, there might be some benefits associated with bringing Real World sensibilities to NASA. Previous administrators would have wasted money trying to actually get to space, instead of entertaining cost-saving ideas such as faking it on a soundstage and giving a press conference where you belligerently insist that you have already landed on Mars but the Fake-News Media just didn’t see it. (The saved money can be used to deport people, preferably people who came here hoping to do science for us because we were a “nice place” with “freedoms.” In a sense, deportation is a kind of space travel. El Salvador is in space.)

It’s not like we’re putting Sean Duffy in charge of a NASA that is going to try to go somewhere. He just needs to sit with it, hold its hand, and make it comfortable. “Do you remember when we used to go to space, Sean?” “Shhhh, grandpa.”

Indeed, I got a look at new missions being contemplated by Duffy’s combined Department of Transportation/NASA, and they are, frankly, a little bleak:

• Fake a moon landing, but on a much worse, dinkier soundstage this time.
• Communicate with extraterrestrial life, but in a hostile, careless way that compels them to immediately attack Earth.
• Space tariffs???
• For the next mission, astronauts will fly to Cincinnati and back, coach class.
• Instead of the planned mission, astronauts will have a sleepover and watch Jupiter Ascending.
• Astronauts will simulate zero gravity by using a bounce house.
• Astronauts will journey to Jupiter, Florida.
• NASA will take over International Star Registry but accept payment in $TRUMP coin only.
• Search for life in the universe, but not intelligent life.
• All astronauts will be routed through Newark Liberty International Airport.
• Light rail will be announced and not built, but for the moon this time.
• All astronauts will be dropped off at the International Space Station, and then NASA will announce that it has to go out to buy cigarettes.
• Speed of light will be revised down to 47 miles an hour to honor Donald J. Trump and make the rate of travel more impressive.
• The team monitoring large asteroids that are coming dangerously close to Earth will start encouraging them to “just come.”

It’s fine. There are some endeavors that are too great for any one individual, goals that require us to come together as a nation and pool our resources to achieve something bigger than any one of us could hope to do alone. And then there is space travel, which is for billionaires.

Besides, if Star Wars has taught us anything, it is that space is full of Nazis. That is the absolute last thing we need: more Nazis.

Read more of Alexandra’s work:

• In retrospect, you should have known that was not Marco Rubio.
• A day in the life of the Gen Z worker

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tom Nichols: Tinker Tailor Soldier MAGA
• Start budgeting for Trump’s tariffs now.
• Conspiracy theorists are turning on the president.

Today’s News

1. President Donald Trump is touring the areas in central Texas where a flash flood over the weekend killed at least 121 people.
2. The FBI is investigating a possible shooting on a cannabis farm in California, where footage appears to show a man firing a weapon at federal agents during an immigration raid yesterday that drew hundreds of protesters.
3. The State Department has begun firing more than 1,300 people, according to an internal notice. The agency is expected to lose approximately 3,000 workers after layoffs and voluntary resignations.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: What happens anywhere—including moves toward authoritarianism—can also happen in America, Boris Kachka writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The End of Airport Shoe-Screening Is Populism Theater

By Ian Bogost

Air travelers in America shall no more doff their chukkas, their wedges, their wingtips, their espadrilles, or their Mary Janes, according to a rule-change announced by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday. It’s been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration started putting people’s footwear through its scanners, after a man named Richard Reid tried and failed to detonate his high-top sneakers on a flight to Miami in December 2001. Indeed, the requirement has been in place so long that my adult children, who were born just before and after the September 11 attacks, didn’t even know its rationale. Feeling the cold airline-terminal floor through socks has been, for them, a lifelong ritual.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Zohran Mamdani reveals the absurdity of affirmative action, Thomas Chatterton Williams argues.
• Men might be the key to an American baby boom.
• The jubilation in Israel is premature, Gershom Gorenberg writes.
• Between “the drive to forget and the obligation to remember”

Culture Break

Watch. This season of Love Island USA (streaming on Peacock) is a romance competition with very little romance. What it reveals is the current state of Gen Z dating, Faith Hill writes.

Log off. AI will never be your kid’s friend, Russell Shaw writes. Chatbots will rob children of important lessons in how to be human.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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