commentary Problems down on Earth are serious. Spending some time looking up isn’t a waste or distraction Published April 7, 2026 12:06PM (EDT) Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. (Image Credit: NASA) Whenever someone likes to claim that the moon landing was faked — a fairly tedious conversation, even as conspiracy theories go — my general response is to ask, “OK, which one?” Most people seem to forget that there were six total crewed landings, all of them conducted by the U.S. government between 1969 and 1972. Aside from some robotic probes, no other country has put human beings on the massive rock that orbits our home planet. Apollo 11 is the most famous of those, of course, but it almost seems that the main reason humans haven’t been back up there in 54 years is because we got bored, which is pretty remarkable in and of itself.…