I was enthused about the Artemis 2 lunar flyby mission. I was. My interest is cooling fast, though, and I fear the worst for NASA’s weekend.

I was turned off by this article about Victor Glover, one of the Artemis 2 astronauts. It was published in the Daily Citizen, which in case you didn’t know, is a rag produced by Focus on the Family…right away you know, it’s going to be all about evangelical Christianity (I don’t recommend that you read further in that publication, a lot of it is about trans-hatred.)

It starts off OK.

After spending six months aboard the ISS, he returned to Earth and praised NASA for allowing him to take communion each week.

“I was able to worship in space,” he said, adding, “[NASA] supported me and my family’s desire to continue to worship and to continue our faith walk even while I was off the planet. That was really important to me.”

You don’t need to praise NASA for “allowing” him to practice his religion. That’s the default. Christians like to believe they are prosecuted for their faith, which sometimes means they pretend to be surprised that they get to pray, when no one, not even atheists like me, are saying that they shouldn’t be allowed to do the innocuous practices of their religion. Go ahead, pray! Take communion! Sing hymns! We aren’t going to complain unless you force your superstitions on us.

If an astronaut wants to wear their lucky socks or carry a rabbit’s foot on board, I can’t imagine NASA complaining. Matters of personal belief are not issues that should be disallowed, although we should also be free to regard rabbit’s feet and communion wafers as silly.

Glover goes on to brag about another silly practice, prayer.

My career is fed by my faith, and you know, anytime I do something that’s pretty risky, I pray — before I fly, every time I fly. Definitely when you go sit on top of a rocket ship.

I have to shrug — yeah, go ahead and pray, just leave me out of it. I’m not impressed with sitting on top of a rocket ship, either. I think you owe more to the engineers who designed and built the machine, than to an imaginary being who played no role in its construction, and isn’t going to help you if something goes wrong.

But he just can’t shut up and has to blurt out a stupid saying.

“In the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”

Well, fuck you too, Victor Glover. There are and have been atheists in foxholes, and on top of rockets, too — but in our Christian country, their existence is ignored, if not belittled. Courage is not an exclusive property of soldiers and astronauts, and many of us feel no need for the crutch of superstition.

Every human being is mortal, and is guaranteed to experience events in their life that carry the threat of their imminent demise, without having to be on top of a rocket. I’d be more scared of riding in an automobile, since more people are going to have traumatic, terrifying events in one of those. Some may pray, some may call out to God, Allah, or their mother, but others will feel helpless acceptance or struggle to escape their situation without the magic mumbo-jumbo. I’ve had a few near-death experiences (I anticipate more in the distant (I hope) future as I get older, and there will ultimately be one that will require dropping the “near-“) but never have I given any thought to a divine being. It’s just not part of the way my mind works.

I’m not going to deny Victor Glover’s mind the ability to flit to thoughts of supernatural salvation when he’s frightened, and he shouldn’t be telling us how other people’s minds will work. Let us instead consider a counter-example, the astronaut John Young, who had an exceptionally accomplished career that makes Victor Glover look like a rookie.

John W. Young, now retired, had the longest career as an astronaut. He’s the only person to have been commander of four classes of spacecraft. He was part of the first two-man space mission. He’s the first person to have orbited the Moon alone. One of three people to have flown to the Moon twice. The list goes on and on. Oh, he’s also one of the 12 people in human history to ever walk on the Moon.

Young was asked about God, and he gave the kind of answer I would give, too.

Interviewer: Did you discovered God up there?

Young: No. I don’t think so.

Interviewer: No sense of awe? Wonder?

Young: No.

Interviewer: Why not?

Young: Because I think that the way things are in space are the way they are and I think that’s a good thing. I think that if people have to go into space to discover God, they have some other kind of problem.

According to Victor Glover, John Young shouldn’t have gone to the Moon. I repeat, fuck you, Victor Glover.

The writer for the Daily Citizen went further and opined even more idiotically.

Indeed, modern science increasingly supports Christian theism. Scientists have discovered that our universe is fine-tuned to support life – and many creatures within it appear intelligently designed. There is also increasing evidence that our universe began at a finite point in the past – raising the question of what – or Who – caused the universe to come into being.

No. Science does not support theism, Christian or otherwise. The fine tuning argument is bullshit — why presuppose “tuning” at all, the universe is what it is, and what life exists within it is by necessity compatible with its physical nature. We do not appear “intelligently designed,” we are constructs of chance and a few billion years of natural selection. Our universe is the product of the expansion of a singularity and we don’t know enough about the properties of that event to say anything about causation, or whether the universe is finite, so don’t bother pretending that science is propping up your creation myth.

Focus on the Family has no control over NASA, but I am concerned about the propaganda NASA will put out this weekend. It’s Easter weekend. They’re sending a ship on a flyby of the Moon. I remember in 1968, NASA sent another manned mission on a flyby of the Moon over Christmas, and they broadcast a reading of the book of Genesis. Having to watch that was one of the nails in the coffin of my religious upbringing, a gross disappointment that radicalized me and made Christianity look even more ridiculous.

Right now, the USA is an embarrassment to the world for a variety of reasons. NASA won’t be helping if they make a goofy-ass evangelical Christian the centerpiece of a major scientific mission, even if only for a day. I’m cringing at the thought that an astronaut is going to preach at us about a resurrection and an empty tomb on Sunday.

I won’t be listening. Victor Glover is reinforcing the spam-in-a-can stereotype, and will further diminish American prestige, what little of it is left. But at least when he lands he can announce that he’s going to Answers in Genesis! They love dumb-ass astronauts there.