On Wednesday, NASA’s Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Reid Wiseman leads the crew, joined by Mission Specialist Christina Koch, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and pilot Victor Glover.
The four are now on a roughly 10-day mission to circumnavigate the moon — the first crewed lunar journey since Apollo 17 in 1972. I have to be honest; I skipped most of the buzz about Artemis II.
NASA’s big moon mission sounds great and all, but nothing tops a SpaceX launch for pure thrill. But hey, going back to the moon; it’s all good. I knew it was happening. I understood the historical stakes. I just didn’t find myself glued to the coverage the way some people were.
I did catch the launch, though. It didn’t quite have that SpaceX punch. And honestly, I kind of forgot about it after.
But then I stumbled across a story that actually got my attention.
Since I wasn’t following the story, I didn’t notice the media gushing over Artemis II as NASA’s most diverse lunar crew in history. As if the fact that human beings are flying around the moon for the first time in half a century somehow plays second fiddle to a demographic breakdown.
Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut to travel around the moon. That’s a factual statement, and it’s not nothing, but leave it to the press to turn a monumental achievement of science and courage into an opportunity for identity box-checking.
Here’s the thing, though. When the Telegraph asked Glover about being the first black astronaut to make this journey, his response didn’t exactly follow the usual script.
He said: “It is a big question, and I wanna highlight, I guess maybe one facet of this is the tension, I call it. I live in this, and you know, this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her, her passion or her interests, or even if it’s not something she wants to do, she can just be like, ‘Girl power,’ and that’s awesome.”
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Glover continued, “And that young brown boys and girls can look at me and go, ‘Hey, he looks like me, and he’s doing what?’ And that’s great. I love that, but I also hope we are pushing the other direction, that one day we don’t have to talk about these first, that one day this is just — And I — Listen to this, that this is the human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity, not black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”
𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐒 𝐈𝐈 𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐔𝐓 𝐒𝐇𝐔𝐓𝐒 𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍 𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐈𝐓𝐘 𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐒 𝐈𝐍 𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐖𝐄𝐑
A reporter tried to make Victor Glover’s Artemis II mission about race. His response should be played in every classroom in America.
Glover — the pilot of the… pic.twitter.com/y6UkweTcDb
— M.A. Rothman (@MichaelARothman) April 2, 2026
Glover could have easily leaned into the racial narrative; instead,10-6 he kinda pushed back, gently but clearly, against the whole premise of the question.
That’s class. That’s perspective.
Do I care about the racial makeup of this crew? No. Do I think identity played a role in how it was assembled? Totally. Glover himself seems quietly aware of that tension. But instead of playing activist, he said what a lot of people are afraid to say out loud: that the goal is a world where none of this needs to be noted at all.
It’s a refreshing thing to hear, especially after Joe Biden spent four years making a sport of announcing “firsts.” First minority for this position. First woman for that position. First minority woman here. First indigenous, two-spirit, polyamorous furry for something else. As if the resume was secondary to the symbolism. The whole exercise was exhausting.
Glover’s answer is a quiet rebuke to all of it. He’s not dismissing representation. He’s doing something harder. He’s asking us to be above obsessing over identity, for us to get to a point where the history being made is just human history.
That’s the right answer.
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