The circumlunar flight in April 2026 clearly exposed the crisis of the idea of space exploration.
Such a flight around the Moon does not require humans at all—they could have sent dogs. The spacecraft was launched despite critical safety issues. Trump gave the order—they took the risk, eager to please. In exactly the same way, space launches in the 1960s were organized for propaganda, when the United States and Soviet Russia were trying to prove whether capitalism or socialism was more economically successful. In Russia, however, there was no socialism—there was capitalism, only in a state form.
The 2026 lunar flight was a promotional, propagandistic act, which only underscored that the grand plans formed in the 1960s were never fulfilled.
But there is a more important aspect.
Spaceflight was a symbol of freedom and knowledge. It also promised imminent and meaningful achievements—like teaching a donkey to read the Qur’an. But in the end, it became a powerful military machine, oncology, a parasite on Tsiolkovsky and Zander. The same is true of the internet. Perhaps people would already be living on the Moon if money had not been spent on war. Now the rocket is прежде всего a means to ruin, to turn a potential opponent into a failed state. I can’t quite find the right English word—cripple? A crippled country, an invalid state. Exactly like Roman raids on barbarians, Mongol raids on the Rus, Russian princes attacking one another, and so on. All “preventive wars,” plus a bit of profit. For some, war is war—but for many it is precisely super-profit, and not only in Russia.
But there is an even more important question.
What did spaceflight symbolize?
It symbolized an encounter with the Other.
Robert Sheckley sarcastically noted that for the bourgeois everything is the other way around: he wants there to be a Hilton on Jupiter, with the usual set of services. The Other is discovered only to be destroyed and replaced with one’s own pathetic comfort.
Yet one need not fly into space to encounter the Other. The Other is always nearby—and not absent within oneself either. But trying to organize a dialogue between a millionaire and a professor is as laborious and hopeless as teaching a donkey to read the Qur’an. And the professor is no more interested in speaking with a millionaire or a cleaner. He cannot even speak with another professor, or with his own wife—unless he is a professor like Einstein, and not a bourgeois professor, seeking not the Other but the same comfort and security.
Money is a secondary question. The primary question concerns goals and the ideals that determine them. The ideal of universal brotherhood is absent everywhere—even among today’s humanists.
There has been enormous progress in medicine—and what of it? In England, the most expensive medicines and procedures have simply been excluded from public health insurance. Too expensive—there isn’t enough for everyone.
Science fiction once imagined that life on the Moon might be easier for some disabled people, because of lower gravity. But is everything possible being done now to ease their lives? No.
The ideal of the intelligentsia—of people like Tsiolkovsky—is not the ideal of the bourgeois, who is selfish by nature. The bourgeois enriches himself through inequality in the distribution of resources; he makes business out of scarcity. He benefits from the growth of scarcity—in knowledge, health, security—not from its disappearance.
Rockets and drones have become primarily military technologies. It was not the military who invented axes or rockets. The same applies to the internet. The military would not have had the imagination to commission the internet—but they had enough intelligence to appropriate it.
Starlink is a great achievement. And what of it? It is used as a weapon, as a means of collective punishment against entire countries, including the one I live in.
Those living in Russia cannot access my website because the whole world is blocked there and a VPN is required—but VPN users are not allowed onto my site. And those living in Ukraine cannot access my site because all of Russia is blocked there.
Are we to justify this by war? Shall we also justify the killing of civilians by war? This is already being done—by everyone, both aggressors and victims. I do not justify it; I do not justify any violence.
The internet must exist. I need it desperately, like air. The speeds we have now are enough for me. Can Starlink give me internet that Russian authorities cannot block? I don’t know. Perhaps technically this is already possible—but kept secret, because Starlink is not interested in overcoming the informational slavery in which I live, not in breaking through the fence built around me. It is interested in erecting a second fence—I have seen such double fences side by side in garden cooperatives. Both democratic bourgeois and dictatorial bourgeois are united in their fear of me, of the self-growing logos. I pity them—but I do not approve.
If Russia suddenly became democratic at the level of the United States, Google Books would still not open for me. Absurd, anti-legal copyright laws—granting libraries and publishers rights over books from Sumer to the present—would remain. Pay, and you will be admitted. Want to read a scholarly monograph? Pay—or join a circle of professors, but to do that you must pass a loyalty test. The system is not ideal, but what can one do.
And then AI lectures me (though I did not ask) that one cannot compare Bucha and Gaza, because in Bucha there were no battles and it was a clash between states, whereas Gaza is not a state. But when Hind Rajab was killed—along with her family and the medics rushing to help—there were no battles. It was a massacre. There was no one with weapons nearby. Moreover, Gaza is worse. In Bucha it was a war crime by a single deranged officer (other occupied towns did not see such atrocities). In Gaza it is a war crime that has been and continues to be carried out—both by orders from above and by the malice of officers and soldiers.
Gaza is not a state—but what difference does that make to a girl whose mouth slowly filled with blood, whose half-decomposed body was recovered only two days later when the shelling stopped? And if you value the state so highly—as a bourgeois would, since the state is the roof over his business—then why are you silent about the 170 Iranian schoolgirls killed in the state of Iran by the state of the United States? Silence is a reasonable tactic—after a few years everything is forgotten and moves into a dusty basement, where Auschwitz—real, not mythical—lies alongside Shatila, Song My, Grozny. The bourgeois know how to remain silent. I do not.
In the killing of Rajab, and in the killing of Iranian schoolgirls, not only Trump and the military are guilty, but also all those bourgeois and their hired workers who invented AI, Starlink, and tons of similar deadly goods. Metal does not kill—its inventors and manufacturers do.
This is why the flight around the Moon inspires in me no delight, only sadness. It testifies to a further decline of democracy in the United States, to growing ignorance, to collectivism—for how can a single person melt at the sight of the Moon, experience “moonjoy”? That is only possible in a group, which is why a collective was sent. And this collective—whether produced by Putin’s system or Trump’s—will destroy the Other, and even anyone in whom it suspects the potential to become Other.
14 April, 2026
Also: History is quality, not quantity: why the flight of Aretemis-II wasn't "history."