A Perfect Descent

Christina’s Moon/NASA

Televisions on top of double-decker rolling carts were wheeled into classrooms across the United States on a late morning at the tail end of January in 1986. The visceral delight that arose upon seeing them come through the door was both reliable and palpable, as they promised an imminent departure from paying close attention to whatever we were being taught at the time. I was an eighth grader at a highly competitive prep school in New York City, and the TVs were there that day so we could watch live as a group of five astronauts and two civilians launched into outer space on their way to the Moon. The civilians were trained by NASA for a period of several months to become ‘payload specialists,’ and one of them was a woman named Christa McAuliffe, who’d been chosen from an ambitious pool of 11,000 candidates nationwide, to be Teacher-In-Space.

We’d been learning about the social studies instructor from Concord, New Hampshire, throughout the prior year. We knew she had a wild chop of reddish-brown hair and a broad, guileless smile that beamed contagious enthusiasm. We knew she was married to her high school sweetheart, Steve, and that they had two young children, named Scott and Caroline, then six and nine.

An entire generation of school kids watched transfixed on that midwinter morning as Ms. McAuliffe, along with her fellow crew members, propelled by several million pounds of rocket fuel, was shot up from Earth into the bright blue canopy of ceaseless sky. We watched them zoom away from the gravitational pull of academic pressure and hormonal riots, cafeteria food and divorcing parents, threats of nuclear war from Russia, and social rejection from our peers. Away from what we’d been learning in our Biology classes downstairs, about the 89% increase in people with AIDS, who our Hollywood President, with his merlot-voice, deigned not to speak of.

The first Space-bound Jewish-American woman, the first Asian-American man, and the second African-American man were all aboard that day. Christa was half Lebanese on her mother’s side. We watched for seventy-three seconds while the still-present promise of a somewhat better union flew toward a place only 24 other humans had ever been.

We listened together as the Mission Control commentator narrated the shuttle’s pre-launch and ascent, carrying us from the world’s heaviness with them.

Go at throttle up, the voice instructed.

Dick Scobee, the Mission Commander, said Roger, just like the movies, and then repeated those words back:

“Go at throttle up.”

Five seconds.

A breath.

Orange and white. A massive fireball. The boosters flying apart in frenzied arcs. Thick smoke, corkscrewing back to us. A trail of vapor winding its way in the silence of nobody wanting to say what they had to have known, smoldering plumes of exhaust twisting through the blue, long tail weaving like the tongue of a hungry snake.__

January 28, 1986/NASA

—

A collective fantasy about life in the 1990s seemed to emerge from the ether earlier this year. It was mostly due, I gathered, to the Insta-terpretation of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s ‘love story’ unspooled over nine frothy episodes through the titular Hulu series, then streaming.

Beacuse, of course, no one conscious back in 1999 needed a High Definition version of events to remember that three young, beautiful people, two of them as internationally famous as anyone in the world could have possibly been, fell out of the hazy July sky in the belly of a Piper Saratoga on their way to a family wedding, piloted by the only son of our universally beloved former President. No one above a certain age will have forgotten that, after an armada of TV cameras was trained off the coast of Hyannis Port, and wall-to-wall cable coverage kept us in its sticky grip for days, the hope we held out for a miracle was seatbuckled on the Ocean floor.

Social media was busy with other matters. The kids were flipping out over white button-down shirts, black loafers, slicked back ponies, and Burberry headbands. They loved the human gazelles traipsing about, smoking cigarettes in a quixotically trashless metropolis. The kissing in ducked-under doorways, staring up moony-eyed at windows. Pay phones and paparazzi. Cocaine and ceramic cups of coffee, slugged inside old-school West Village diners. The muted shouting and shoving in the middle of Central Park, back when bounties were made from the barrel of a telephoto lens.

The cool Calvin minimalist aesthetic and streamlined postmodern loftiness of it all. The elite party-goers nestled among cushy banquettes inside velvet lounges. The low-tech pre-war offices of publishing startups. The floating dot com bubble of available jobs, unregulated money, and the prospect of affording a studio alone, one with afternoon light.

The Before Times?

They were then.

Before that floating fat bubble burst, the millennium turned, and we watched our innocence end.

Ryan Murphy’s Carolyn

I don’t blame the kids for their longing. They were served up soft-lit locations and a photoshopped version of events. Complexity, character, and nuance were smoothed, like they were crows’ feet or panty lines. Spoonfed for the commodified, contentified world in which the audience now resides.

But I was really living there then, and I miss it, too, sometimes.

Falling into a fugue state while flipping CDs at Tower Records. Coming home to the secrets of my answering machine’s winking red light. Real letters in recognizable handwriting stuffed inside my mailbox. Following the City’s long, buzzy current on a crush-seeking, friend-filled night.

I miss irony and parody and reproductive freedom. I miss Princess Diana, arts funding, and the Greenland ice sheet. I miss the Village Voice, Nora Ephron, and the Federal Assault Ban. I miss sugar and gluten, or when TV advertised shampoo and toys instead of depression and erections.

I miss loving people so much they seemed immortal.

I miss wanting things so much they felt inevitable.

Me, Circa 2000

—

This April 1st was when I glanced up from a stream of sweet birthday texts, looked at my muted TV, and learned we were headed for the Moon again. I had zero prior notice this was a thing that was happening, which is weird because didn’t they use to give us a lot of advanced hype and hullabaloo (and shouldn’t we all use the word hullabaloo more than we do?) before manned trips to the moon?

Point is that going to the Moon is exciting! It’s uniting! Who doesn’t love going to the moon?!

Judging by the invisible slip knot that coiled around my musculature when I saw the rocket fire blazing in the sky, and the immediate/voluminous response to what I screenshot and then posted right afterward…

An entire generation, that’s who.

—

Secret Service and Law Enforcement race around the Hilton. Everyone in their Black Tie attire is told to GET DOWN. The DC press corps drops under tables. One older man continues eating his burrata. Two younger women seemingly steal wine. There we are, behind our screens, eyes wide, then glazed, jaws agape, then slackening.

There we are again, watching.

Watching as men in full tactical gear leap-frog across cushioned chairs, scaring the mentalist, secreting away the cabinet, abandoning Cheryl Hines. The Curb Your Enthusiasm theme will be dubbed over a clip of this moment, and later passed around online. Armed men turn to face the bedazzled media from a stage, with their machine guns drawn.

Fire whoever wrote this episode of America, it was far too on the nose.

April 25, 2026, The Hilton Ballroom

Before the clock could strike midnight, still tuxedoed, he appears, standing behind a hastily affixed Presidential Seal. For a few minutes, he’ll strike what some Beltway shithead will refer to as a conciliatory tone. Then he’ll declare that all these attempts on his life are because he’s made the USA so hot. As if the country were a woman, he planned to take furniture shopping before cornering in a bungalow to fuck.

Within minutes of the alleged attempt, a chorus would shriek in near-unison across TwiXter that a billion-dollar, drone-proof ballroom has never been more justified. Nevermore than after this , the third attempt on his life. Norah O’Donnell interviews him the next night on the airwaves of CBS’s bent knee. He will seem not-crazy for around two minutes, before snarling at her,

You’re a disgrace.

Her crime was daring to read words from the assassin’s manifesto, like rapist, to his face.

Those still permitted to participate in this farcical dance of a functional democracy with a still viable Fourth Estate play their parts. They hoist microphones, shine key lights, count back from three, and fold careful waves of glossy hair behind their ears. But nobody in a position of any journalistic legitimacy will say:

Mr. President, do you think threatening to end an entire civilization on the internet a couple of weeks back might be contributing to the tone of dangerous political rhetoric you’re claiming is the fault of Democrats?

Or words to that effect.

No one asks him directly whether the US President writing on his social media platform that he’s _GLAD _the former FBI Director is dead might not, in fact, be the kind of thing corrupting the tenor of our discourse. Nobody confronts him with the violently homophobic Paul Pelosi memes his son passed around after he was nearly beaten to death in the Speaker of the House’s home. Nobody reminds him of his callous disregard for Gretchen Whitmer’s attempted kidnapping, or his defamatory blaming of Tim Walz for the assassination of Minnesota’s Majority Leader, her husband, and their dog.

No one says anything along the lines of:

Sir, when you granted full, unconditional pardons and commutations to every individual charged or convicted in connection with the events of January 6th, every single person who tried to overthrow our government in your name, people who literally shat on the Capitol, beat 174 cops, hunted the whole House of Representatives and tried to hang your Vice-President—do you think, given your stated wish for an end to political violence, that might have been a mistake?

Ok, Look.

I know what you’re thinking. What does any of this have to do with the moon or the nineties, and why, Amanda, won’t you shut the fuck up about him?

Why do I keep bringing it up? As if anyone wants or needs to be reminded.

I bring it up because I feel driven to put some language around the experience I am convinced so many decent Americans are having under such non-stop, frenetic weight. I continue trying to express how impossible it is, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, for any of us to digest or absorb the majority of what we are living through, because I do not think living through what we’re ACTUALLY living through is talked about nearly enough.

I need to keep flagging the neverthelessness of it because I feel too crazy otherwise; that we continue waking up, preparing our morning beverages, washing our faces, walking our dogs, ferrying our kids, going to work, for those lucky to still have jobs, saying hello and goodbye to the people we love, and then doing it all again. The fact that everything goes on and on (and on!) as if we aren’t all trapped inside the same cheap acrylic snow globe being frantically shaken by the badly bruised fists of a narcoleptic madman…

And of course we go on! Because what other choice do we have?

Here we are, right now, you reading this thing I’ve been struggling to write for many, many weeks, not sure if it will make any sense at all. Not sure, for one, because I am filled with debilitating self-doubt, but two, because the actual time and energy needed to describe things is a hostage to the very chaos in charge.

—

Nostalgia is a form of grief, someone said, and I’ve been thinking about that lately, a lot.

The primal longing for a time defined by not knowing what you have. Forgetting how much you didn’t—couldn’t—yet possibly understand. So much self-wreckage still buckled, waiting on the ocean floor.

My generation came of age being taught that sex itself could kill you. The television movie that defined our childhood was a graphic depiction of nuclear holocaust and its radioactive aftermath.

Perhaps, it shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that after we saw seven good, brave people disappear in a ball of fire, our teachers turned the televisions off and didn’t say another word.

—

The first successful manned moon orbit since 1972, which happens to be the year I was born, was launched on what happens to have been my birthday this year. When those astronauts reentered our shared space, when we could watch it get closer and closer to the water, and then all the correct parachutes deployed, including the last three red ones, I found myself unexpectedly weeping. Thrust straight back to the Elmer’s glue-scented kindergarten classroom where I felt both alive and safe. I was sitting on the knubby wall-to-wall carpet, a whole planetary system made from colored construction paper hanging above me (Saturn was my favorite, because duh, the rings) next to my delicate-featured, soft-spoken teacher, Miss Romaine. We were reading a picture book about astronauts in Space. Those three red balloons in the dark blue water. I remembered them. And I remembered the men in scuba gear who helped the astronauts get from the water home.

Unless you’re brand new here, you’re aware I’m no stranger to grief or nostalgia, or the surfacing of my own wreckage. I’m no stranger to being in dialogue with the bottom of my own being. It had been a while, though, since I’d cried this much, with relief.

Relief that they were back on Earth, back at home, safe, yes.

But there was something else.

Certain things need to happen to keep going around here. One of them was those astronauts and that space mission that launched on April 1st. I __ needed the crackly NASA voice narrating again. I __ needed him to give me what the 8th-grade voice took away.

“There’s three good-looking parachutes.”

A few seconds of silence, while the capsule falls and then floats.

“A perfect descent for Integrity.”

That’s what the NASA voice said this time when our atmosphere delivered them alive.

I needed to watch those good, brave humans splash down ten days after they took off, right on target under the wide, bright San Diego sky. I needed everyone’s eyes on the same screen, listening to one voice, praying the same prayer.

I needed to feel my hope, and yours, still out there, somewhere.

Reid Wiseman shoots the Moon

Perfect Descent, April 10, 2026

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