Progress is not always linear, and sometimes it keeps going in circles. Just ask Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were booked in June 2024 on what they thought was a week-long trip to the International Space Station. To this day they are stuck in a high-speed version of Groundhog Day, zipping around Earth and seeing the sun rise and set 16 times in 24 hours — with no clear end in sight. Meanwhile, NASA keeps talking about the importance of putting the first woman on the moon by way of their Artemis space program, which is also plagued by epic delays. I bet those two astronauts on the ISS would be thrilled if NASA paid as much attention to providing safe rides home as it does to increasing lunar diversity.

I don’t recall anyone being offended when the plaque on Apollo’s lunar lander was revealed to read, “We came in peace for all mankind.” But that’s because gender neutral language hadn’t been invented yet and people in 1969 had far more important things to worry about, like whether the Beatles would break up or not.

Toxic masculinity wasn’t a thing back then either, and so, nobody was alarmed that in addition to the Apollo 11 crew, the fourth man to come along in peace was President Richard Nixon. His was the 4th signature on the plaque, under a message that makes him sound like a champion of inclusivity. It was the middle of the Cold War after all. Doing something for “all mankind” in 1969 meant that you did it for the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, too.

Today we are surprised and deeply touched by the fact that Nixon’s signature has a reasonable font pitch, not the fat, king-size Sharpie look that we are currently seeing again on countless executive orders held into cameras in the Oval Office. I’m pretty sure, however, that before signing, Trump in 1969 would have insisted on changing the plaque’s sentiment to something snappier like, “We beat you to it, losers.” OK, before I get completely carried away with nostalgia for Richard Nixon’s big heart, let’s spend a little more time on NASA’s “Fly #MeToo the Moon” mission — and the fact that it’s been already accomplished, sort of:

Many of those watching the all-male crew of Apollo 11 blasting off in July 1969 were old enough to remember that the first woman had been sent to the moon a long time ago — not by NASA, but by Fritz Lang. The famous Austrian-born German-American director known for expressionist films such as “Metropolis” and “M” had checked the gender diversity box for space travel 40 years earlier in his movie “Frau im Mond.” And he did it without fanfare or dramatic scenes of breaking glass ceilings. Apparently, and in contrast to today’s America, progressives in Weimar Germany weren’t of the preachy kind. The “Woman in the Moon” certainly wasn’t, which was, of course, massively helped by the fact that she was cast in one of the last silent films. There is only so much proselytizing you can do with subtitles. But you can use them to invent the countdown, which is what Lang did in 1929 by projecting the remaining seconds before lift-off on the screen. NASA happily admitted that they took the idea from Lang, invited him to attend rocket launches in the 1960s and appointed him honorary father of rocket science.

So far NASA hasn’t admitted that lunar diversity was also invented by Fritz Lang. Maybe it’s because it took Lang less than three hours to put a woman on the moon, and NASA’s Artemis program has been struggling to do the same since 2017. You might of course argue that Fritz Lang’s moonshot wasn’t real, but somehow it feels real enough in our post-truth society.

Henning Schroeder is a professor emeritus who taught in the College of Liberal Arts (German Studies) and the School of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota. His email address is [email protected] and his Twitter (X) handle is @HenningSchroed1.

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