By Timmy T. Tater
Editor, Chief Spud and Space Enthusiast
The Sweet Potato
In a move so cosmically on-the-nose that even Stanley Kubrick’s ghost allegedly chuckled from beyond, NASA chose April 1st — April Fools’ Day — to launch four astronauts toward the Moon aboard Artemis II, rekindling humanity’s ancient tradition of going to the Moon and absolutely nobody believing it.
The rocket lifted off Wednesday evening at 5:35 p.m. Tater Time from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, because apparently NASA’s scheduling department has a flair for the dramatic and a complete disregard for the conspiracy theory community’s blood pressure.
The mission, the first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972, was greeted with thunderous applause from the scientific community and thunderous skepticism from approximately eleven million people typing furiously in comment sections across the globe.
“They did it again,” wrote one anonymous internet philosopher, presumably from his mother’s basement. “First they fake the Moon landing 53 years ago. Now they fake going back. And they pick April Fools’ Day. Wake up, sheeple. The audacity.”
He makes a fair point. If NASA truly wanted the public to believe this mission was real, perhaps scheduling it on, say, a random Tuesday in November would have been more convincing. Instead, they chose the one day of the calendar year officially designated for lies, pranks, and the announcement of absurd things that turn out not to be true. Bold strategy, NASA. Bold strategy.
In a last-minute twist worthy of the day, engineers quickly resolved a last-minute Flight Termination System issue that briefly put the mission in “No-Go” status just over an hour before launch, which the conspiracy community immediately identified as “a classic distraction.” From what, exactly, remains unclear, though leading theories involve lizard people, chemtrails, and the Denver Airport murals.
Sources close to the mission confirm that the crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are real people and not CGI, though several Reddit threads remain unconvinced. “Look at the pixels,” said one commenter. Nobody looked at the pixels.
Adding further fuel to the conspiratorial fire, an issue was reported with the only toilet onboard the Orion capsule early in the mission. This, the internet agrees, is very suspicious. A fake mission would have working toilets. This means either NASA is real and underfunded, or the simulation is so elaborate they even programmed in a broken bathroom. Either way, someone is not having a good time 252,000 miles from Earth.
The crew is expected to travel farther from Earth than anyone in history — a record that will, of course, be dismissed by roughly the same number of people who believe the Earth is a snow globe being shaken by a bored deity.
To be fair to the doubters, NASA has not made this easy on itself. The agency spent 53 years not going back to the Moon, which is a suspicious amount of time to not revisit somewhere you’ve allegedly already been. If you discovered a great barbecue joint, you wouldn’t wait half a century to go back. You’d be there every weekend. The Moon conspiracy crowd has been making this exact argument since 1972, and honestly, it’s the most coherent thing they’ve ever said.
But here we are. On April Fools’ Day 2026, humanity is returning to the Moon. Or, according to a non-trivial portion of the internet, humanity is returning to a very expensive Hollywood soundstage, this time with better special effects, a more diverse cast, and a malfunctioning space toilet for authenticity.
NASA, for its part, issued no official comment on the date selection, which is exactly what you’d say if you were hiding something.
The Moon, reached for comment, reflected sunlight silently and offered no opinion — which is also, come to think of it, exactly what you’d do if you were in on it.
Godspeed, Artemis II. Or, you know. Godspeed, very convincing simulation of Artemis II. Either way, the view looks incredible.
