When Artemis II Came Home
When I watched the story of Artemis II unfold, I saw more than another successful NASA mission. I saw another reminder that Black achievement in science and technology did not begin yesterday. Artemis II carried four astronauts around the Moon and safely returned them to Earth on April 10, 2026. NASA astronaut Victor Glover served as the pilot, alongside commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Glover is a Black naval aviator, test pilot, astronaut, and engineer whose résumé would be impressive in anybody’s hands. He earned a bachelor’s degree in general engineering and three master’s degrees in flight test engineering, systems engineering, and military operational art and science. That matters because sometimes public conversations about diversity make it sound as though somebody’s race explains why they entered the room. Glover’s education, military career, flight experience, previous space mission, and astronaut training make clear that he did not arrive through anybody’s charity. At the same time, I would not say he personally steered Orion to within a mile of its splashdown point, because modern spacecraft navigation and reentry involve the crew working with automated systems and large teams on the ground. Artemis II was a team accomplishment from launch through recovery. What impressed me was seeing Black excellence standing inside that enormous team without needing anybody to lower the standard.
Victor Glover Was Prepared for the Seat
There is something about Glover’s background that challenges the lazy assumption that diversity and qualifications are opposites. Before becoming an astronaut, he had accumulated thousands of flight hours and served as a Navy test pilot. NASA selected him as an astronaut in 2013 after he had already built a demanding military and engineering career. He later piloted NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission and spent months aboard the International Space Station. He completed four spacewalks during that earlier mission. By the time he climbed aboard Orion for Artemis II, he was not some inexperienced man being given an opportunity so NASA could check a racial box. He had spent years preparing for exactly that kind of responsibility. I think about how often Black professionals have been placed in the position of having to prove that they deserved to enter rooms where nobody questioned everybody else’s presence. That pressure can create the feeling that being good is never enough because you have to be undeniably good. I do not believe Black people should have to be twice as qualified to receive equal consideration. But history gives us plenty of examples where Black excellence had to become impossible to overlook before institutions finally recognized it.
Black Women Behind the Mission
The astronauts receive the photographs, but space exploration has always depended on thousands of people whose names most Americans will never know. Artemis II was no different. Engineers, flight controllers, scientists, launch specialists, recovery teams, medical personnel, technicians, programmers, and managers worked across NASA facilities to make the mission possible. Black women were part of that workforce and held serious responsibilities inside the Artemis program. NASA’s first female launch director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, led launch operations for Artemis II on April 1, 2026. NASA has also highlighted diverse women throughout the Artemis launch and recovery teams, which look very different from the rooms shown in photographs from the early space program. At Johnson Space Center, people such as Artemis ground-control flight lead Aaisha Ali have helped prepare teams, procedures, simulations, and mission operations. I would be careful about repeating an exact claim that four particular Black women controlled the mission unless I could identify each woman and verify her role. Their contributions do not need exaggeration to become impressive. The real story is that Black women today occupy technical and leadership spaces from which earlier generations were often excluded.
Katherine Johnson Had Already Shown Us
Long before anybody used the term DEI, Katherine Johnson was sitting at NASA doing mathematics that the American space program needed. She worked in an era when segregation was not a theory but an everyday institutional reality. NASA’s own history records that Johnson initially worked among the African American women known as the West Area Computers at Langley. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard’s mission and later checked computer calculations connected with John Glenn’s orbital flight. That last detail matters because John Glenn trusted her mathematical ability enough to want her to verify the machine’s work. She was not sitting there because somebody wanted a more diverse photograph. She was sitting there because she could do the mathematics. The movie Hidden Figures helped millions of Americans learn what Black families had understood for generations: ability can exist even when opportunity refuses to recognize it. Katherine Johnson’s story does not prove that every modern diversity program is automatically wise or effective. What it proves is that institutions have sometimes overlooked exceptional talent because of race. Any serious discussion about merit has to remember what America once called merit while women like Johnson were doing extraordinary work from segregated rooms.
Ed Dwight and the Opportunity That Almost Was
Then there is Ed Dwight, whose story makes the other side of the argument difficult to ignore. Dwight became the first Black American astronaut candidate in a military training program during the early 1960s. NASA’s own history describes the discrimination he faced from fellow trainees and government officials before he eventually left the Air Force. He had the intelligence, military background, and aviation ability to enter that world, yet opportunity did not depend on qualifications alone. Race was sitting in the room too. Decades later, Dwight finally traveled into space commercially in 2024, more than sixty years after that original opportunity was derailed. His story reminds me that exclusion can be real even when somebody technically meets the standard. Sometimes the standard itself is applied differently depending on who is standing in front of it. That history is part of why later efforts to widen recruitment and opportunity developed in the first place. We can debate which modern policies are fair without pretending the older system was colorblind. If we erase the discrimination, we will never understand why corrective efforts appeared.
Guy Bluford, Mae Jemison, and Ronald McNair
Black space history did not begin and end with one extraordinary person. Guion “Guy” Bluford became the first African American to travel into space in 1983. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman in space in 1992. Ronald McNair was a brilliant physicist and astronaut who flew aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger before losing his life with the crew in the 1986 disaster. Those achievements did not happen because Black Americans suddenly became intelligent enough for spaceflight in the late twentieth century. The talent had always been present. What changed was the degree to which institutions allowed that talent access to training, education, recruitment, and opportunity. NASA itself has acknowledged the importance of broadening its astronaut corps beyond the overwhelmingly white male classes of earlier decades. When I see Glover flying around the Moon today, I can appreciate his individual accomplishment while remembering the doors other people pushed against before him. History does not diminish his achievement. It gives me a fuller understanding of what it took for that achievement to become possible.
Black Excellence Reaches Beyond NASA
The larger story of Black scientific and military achievement reaches far beyond the astronaut corps. Gladys West performed mathematical work that contributed to models essential to the development of modern satellite geodesy and eventually GPS technology. The Tuskegee Airmen fought fascism overseas while serving a country that still segregated them at home. Carl Brashear fought racial discrimination inside the Navy and became the first Black master diver in United States naval history. Those people came from different fields and different periods, but a common theme runs through their stories. They were not asking institutions to pretend they were qualified. They were asking institutions to stop using race as a reason to overlook qualifications already present. That distinction gets lost when every conversation about opportunity becomes reduced to whether somebody supports or opposes three letters called DEI. Black achievement predates modern diversity offices by centuries. Black people created, invented, studied, fought, taught, engineered, calculated, and led while discrimination was actively trying to prevent them from doing so. No government diversity initiative created that excellence.
What DEI Was Supposed to Address
When people talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they are sometimes talking past each other because the same phrase can describe very different policies. Some programs focused on recruiting qualified applicants from groups historically overlooked by institutions. Others involved mentoring, workplace climate, accessibility, training, contracting, or efforts to examine whether hiring systems produced unnecessary barriers. Critics argue that certain DEI programs turned too much attention toward racial or gender identity and risked treating people differently because of protected characteristics. Supporters argue that ignoring race after generations of discrimination can allow old patterns to continue under supposedly neutral rules. Both concerns deserve examination. I do not support lowering genuine professional standards merely so an institution can produce a particular racial statistic. I also do not accept the assumption that seeing more Black professionals automatically means somebody lowered a standard. Sometimes widening the doorway simply allows qualified people who were always outside the usual network to compete. The real measure should be whether standards remain meaningful and whether access to meeting those standards is genuinely fair. Merit and opportunity should be working together rather than being turned into political enemies.
The Trump Administration Changed Federal DEI Policy
President Donald Trump has taken a very different approach to federal DEI policy since returning to office in January 2025. His administration ordered federal agencies to terminate DEI and DEIA offices, programs, preferences, initiatives, and related requirements to the maximum extent permitted by law. The administration argues that these policies replace individual merit with racial and other forms of preferential treatment. It has also revoked earlier federal affirmative-action requirements for federal contractors and directed agencies to emphasize individual skills, performance, and equal treatment under civil-rights law. Supporters see that approach as restoring colorblind standards and preventing discrimination in the name of diversity. Critics see the broader anti-DEI campaign as threatening programs designed to correct longstanding barriers and expand opportunity for people historically excluded from powerful institutions. I think those competing claims deserve more than campaign slogans. We should examine what specific program is being eliminated, what that program actually did, whether it used unlawful preferences, and whether ending it produces better or worse access to opportunity. Not everything called DEI deserves automatic defense. But not everything called DEI was a system for handing unqualified Black people positions they had not earned either.
Racism Was the Original Preference System
There is one thing I cannot forget when somebody tells me America should return to a time when everything was supposedly based only on merit. Which time are we talking about? For much of American history, race itself functioned as one of the strongest preference systems imaginable. White applicants could receive opportunities Black people were legally prohibited or informally prevented from pursuing. Segregated schools restricted educational opportunity. Employers excluded Black workers from occupations and promotions regardless of talent. Universities imposed racial barriers, professional organizations closed doors, and housing discrimination affected where Black families could live and what schools their children could attend. None of that was merit. It was preference disguised as normal society. The answer today should not be creating another unfair system in the opposite direction. The answer should be making certain that what we call merit is actually being measured without hidden barriers deciding who gets the chance to demonstrate it.
Being Qualified Does Not Mean Race Never Matters
I also reject the idea that mentioning race somehow diminishes a Black person’s achievement. Victor Glover can be extraordinarily qualified and historically significant as a Black astronaut at the same time. Katherine Johnson can be a brilliant mathematician and a Black woman who overcame segregation at the same time. Those facts do not compete. Race matters in their stories because institutions once used race to restrict people who looked like them. Pretending not to notice race can sometimes erase part of what made their journeys historically meaningful. At the same time, I do not want every Black accomplishment introduced as though the person’s most important qualification was being Black. Their education, skill, preparation, discipline, courage, and performance should remain at the center. The strongest version of Black history does not ask anybody to choose between excellence and identity. It shows how excellence survived even when identity was used against the person carrying it. That is a story worth telling accurately.
The Meaning of Artemis II
Artemis II means something special because it joined history with possibility. Victor Glover became part of the first crew to travel around the Moon in more than fifty years. The mission reached farther from Earth than any humans had previously traveled and returned safely after nearly ten days. Glover’s presence did not make the spacecraft fly because of his race. His training and the work of thousands of qualified people made the mission possible. But seeing a Black man in that seat matters in a country where Ed Dwight once encountered racial barriers while trying to enter America’s astronaut pipeline. Both truths belong in the same story. I can celebrate individual merit and understand historical progress without reducing either one. Artemis II does not prove every DEI program is good. What it does prove is that Black excellence has no difficulty meeting the highest standards when opportunity and preparation come together. That is considerably more powerful than any political slogan.
Summary
Black excellence in America’s space program has existed across generations and cannot honestly be dismissed as the product of modern DEI programs. Victor Glover piloted Artemis II after building an exceptional career as a naval aviator, test pilot, engineer, astronaut, and holder of three master’s degrees. Black women also hold significant technical and leadership positions throughout NASA’s modern workforce. Katherine Johnson demonstrated decades earlier that extraordinary Black talent could exist even within segregated institutions. Ed Dwight’s experience reminds us that qualifications did not always guarantee Black Americans equal opportunity. Guy Bluford, Mae Jemison, Ronald McNair, and many others expanded the visible history of Black space exploration. Modern DEI programs vary widely and should be judged according to what they actually do rather than defended or condemned only by their label. The Trump administration has deliberately ended many federal DEI programs because it argues that merit should replace identity-based preferences. Critics argue that eliminating those programs can remove tools designed to address documented historical barriers. America’s earlier racial system was itself profoundly unequal and frequently denied qualified Black people opportunities based on race. The strongest standard today should protect genuine merit while ensuring that race no longer decides who gets the opportunity to demonstrate it.
Conclusion
When I look at Artemis II, I do not see evidence that somebody handed a Black man a seat he had not earned. I see Victor Glover sitting in a seat his preparation made him capable of filling. I see Katherine Johnson’s calculations somewhere in the history behind him. I see Ed Dwight fighting against a door that did not open when it should have. I see Guy Bluford, Mae Jemison, Ronald McNair, and generations of Black scientists, engineers, pilots, mathematicians, and technicians who refused to let somebody else’s expectations define their ability. I also understand that Americans can reasonably disagree over modern DEI policies and how far government should go in correcting inequality. What I will not accept is the idea that Black achievement itself should become suspicious simply because institutions finally look more diverse than they once did. Black excellence was here before DEI had a name. It was here while segregation was still the law. It remained when opportunity was denied and kept showing up whenever a door finally opened. Artemis II did not create Black excellence; it simply gave the world another place to see it.