On the penultimate day of their 10-day mission, the Artemis II crew awoke more than 140,000 miles from Earth to the shuffling drumbeat and sharp guitar licks of ” Lonesome Drifter,” by country singer and Texas native Charley Crockett.

For those of us who have been locked into the daily streams from the Artemis mission, Crockett’s song was an apt needle drop. The music video for the propulsive, bluesy track introduces Crockett’s vagabond storyteller as a “wanderer” who had grown fearful of “isolated rebellion escalating into outright revolution after years of lawless corruption.” He rejected the advances of a crime syndicate “desiring only to be free on the open road.”

Who among us can’t relate? Tracking the Orion spacecraft’s journey down the lunar highway has been a welcome escape from the daily chaos and turmoil here on Earth.

On the same day that President Donald Trump set the world on edge by threatening to obliterate Iran, NASA released astonishing images from Artemis’ lunar flyby. Mission commander Reid Wiseman’s ” Earthset ” photograph captured our planet enveloped in darkness, save for a cloudy blue crescent hovering over the moon’s charcoal, cratered surface. Another photo showed a solar eclipse, rendering the moon a black orb shrouded in a ghostly white halo.

These images are sobering and humbling reminders that this natural satellite is, in the words of astronaut Christina Koch, ” not just a poster in the sky that goes by.” It’s essential to our existence, a ballast whose gravitational pull maintains the delicate climatic balance that allows life on Earth to flourish.

We’ve lived vicariously through this joyous astronaut crew. Their natural camaraderie was infectious even through a screen hundreds of thousands of miles away. We laughed when the livestream captured a floating jar of Nutella. We cried when the crew requested that a moon crater be named after Carroll Wiseman, the late wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman, who passed away from cancer in 2020. We grooved and nodded our heads to the wake-up call songs from Crockett, Chappell Roan and Denzel Curry.

Yet whether the Artemis II mission will be a brief sugar high for NASA or a bellwether for continued human spaceflight remains unclear.

While the astronauts were drifting toward the moon, the Trump administration released its fiscal year 2027 budget, which included slashing NASA’s budget by nearly one quarter from its current level of funding. Most of those cuts encompass NASA’s scientific research, including a new telescope launch, the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon and the Juno probe currently observing Jupiter’s dense atmosphere.

“NASA’s budget is greater than every other space agency across the world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told CNN, in support of the budget cuts.

Isaacman noted that the space agency’s Artemis program, which aims to build a lunar base and eventually send humans to Mars, would continue to receive federal funding. The timeline for the next phase of that endeavor, however, remains murky. While Artemis III, which will send astronauts to the lunar surface, is tentatively scheduled for mid-2027, NASA has yet to select a lunar lander. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are building spacecraft for the mission that are still being tested.

Isaacman deserves some credit for the successful launch of Artemis II and restoring U.S. leadership in space science. But maintaining our momentum toward further exploration and discovery is crucial. NASA managed to stave off Trump’s draconian budget cut proposal a year ago. We urge Isaacman, as well as Texas’ congressional delegation, to not let politics interfere with critical scientific research.

— Houston Chronicle