American Vice President Mike Pence announced this week that the Trump administration wants NASA to put American astronauts on the moon no later than 2024.
And here at Gizmodo we heartily endorse this idea. America must go to the moon. We must go to the moon and bring back our piss and our shit.
American astronauts travelled to the moon and back six times between 1969 and 1972. Those brave men brought back roughly 382kg of moon rocks, and they left an estimated 96 bags of trash on the surface of the moon, including their piss and their shit.
We must bring it all back, not just to be responsible stewards of the moon, but to provide a public monument on Earth that best sums up what it’s like to be alive in the early 21st century.
“At the direction of the president of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years,” American Vice President Mike Pence said on March 26. Sadly, Pence didn’t mention the piss and the shit that we left up there.
The United States left behind quite a few things on the moon, including five American flags, two golf balls, and a photo of astronaut Charlie Duke’s family. But the bags of piss and shit must be prioritised as historical artifacts that should immediately be brought back to Earth when we go back to the moon next.
We must come together for the good of our nation and put the bags filled with piss and shit on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. And if not at the Smithsonian, then maybe at other sites like the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.
There would be perhaps no greater testament to the Trump administration’s actions at home and abroad than to bring back all the piss and shit that America left on the moon. American President Trump has boldly stood up for the worst aspects of human nature and future generations need to understand everything he’s done for us.
It’s not just the concentration camps, the anti-trans hate, or the countless other acts of cruelty both big and small perpetuated by his government.
It’s the failure to confront the most important and potentially catastrophic issues of our generation and the generations to come, including climate change, which the president has previously called a Chinese hoax.
It’s the fact that his presidency has normalised anger and division in a way that we can’t even quantify. No other president has filled the American consciousness with so much piss and so much shit on a daily basis.
Just this week the U.S president dragged the national discourse even lower when he mocked asylum seekers at one of his neo-fascist rallies in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“It’s a big fat con-job,” Trump said, referring to the people seeking asylum from countries in Central and South America. “A big fat con-job.”
Any alien species that might visit us in the future would likely inquire what President Trump meant by calling suffering people such terrible names. But we could just point to the enduring monument of his presidency: 96 bags of piss and shit. Let’s make it happen, friends.
We believe we can do it and we won’t apologise for our American exceptionalism. We believe that with the right determination and leadership, America can do anything. Including bringing back bags of piss and shit from the moon.
We’re the first to admit that bringing back all that piss and shit won’t be easy. The entire reason that all this trash was left on the moon’s surface in the first place was that neither the Apollo Command and Service Module nor the Apollo Lunar Module could hold very much cargo in one trip.
Frankly, it’s amazing that they were able to bring back 382kg of moon rocks and dust, but they certainly wouldn’t have been able to do that with so much piss and shit dragging them down.
Whatever spacecraft America builds to visit the moon must be a state-of-the-art machine that can carry both humans and a whole lot of piss. And shit.
Granted, just because U.S Vice President Mike Pence said that something is going to happen doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. The most realistic NASA plan for a moonshot is 2028, but that wouldn’t be within President Trump’s potential two terms, which could end by January 2025. U.S President Trump presumably wants to go back to the moon so that he can claim credit for it, but people will inevitably ask why.
Why go to the moon when we have so many problems here on Earth? Believe it or not, plenty of people asked that same thing during the 1960s.
There aren’t a lot of convincing answers when hundreds of thousands of Americans go to sleep on pavement every night, or when Americans are dying because they can’t afford basic life-saving medication like insulin.
Like climbing Everest, some things are simply worth doing because they are there. But we have a higher purpose now in this latest moon landing, we just need to add it to the proposal. We can bring back the piss and the shit.
The 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing is this summer, on July 20, 2019, and it’s a safe bet that U.S President Trump will try to join the festivities already planned around the nation.
But the president should take this opportunity to make his case for why returning to the moon is so important: We must bring back the piss. But we must not forget the shit—we will bring both of them back. Because this is America. And we can do anything.
Bring back Neil Armstrong’s piss. Bring back Buzz Aldrin’s shit. We should have it all. It deserves to return home to President Trump, America’s most piss-ant, shit-mouthed president.
There should be no greater symbol of President Trump’s legacy than a piss-and-shit monument on American soil. Sure, the president will probably try to drop a MAGA hat up there or brand the lunar spacecraft with the Trump name. And there’s nothing we can really do to stop him when it comes to that.
He’ll be well into his second term, and his former lawyer says that, in the event that Trump loses, he probably won’t even leave office anyway. But we can sincerely encourage the president to reach for the stars. And the piss and the shit.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon and bring back our shit. Not because it is easy, but because it is hard. And don’t forget the piss—it is also hard.