The Friday Brief, April 10, 2026

We Can Still Do This

Inside

We Can Still Do This
The Straits of Bitcoin
Rods From God
The MAGA Crackup
Ellison’s Centrist Media Mirage
Meloni Gets Nervous
Anthropic’s Mythos: The AI Oppenheimer Moment
Send Barron
MAGA Family Feud

The Big Picture

We Can Still Do This

Somewhere over the Pacific, four human beings are hurtling back from the Moon at nearly 25,000 miles per hour.

They launched last Wednesday evening from Kennedy Space Center, a mixed crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, strapped atop the most powerful rocket ever flown with crew, heading farther from Earth than any human has traveled since the Apollo 13 crew limped home in 1970.

They raced around the back of the Moon, used its gravity like a slingshot, and are arcing back toward a splashdown off San Diego tonight. The whole journey covers 695,000 miles. The margin for error, particularly on reentry, when the capsule hits the atmosphere at temperatures approaching half the surface of the sun, is essentially zero. All of us who saw Challenger and Columbia know why.

Watch the NASA coverage of the last week for ten minutes, and you feel something shift in your chest.

The flight controllers in Houston speak in calm, clipped sentences. The checklists are exhaustive. Every contingency has been gamed out, rehearsed, and stress-tested. Commander Wiseman, a former Navy test pilot, described the moment before the translunar injection burn, the burn that committed them to the Moon, like this: “We just kind of looked at each other as a crew.” Then they executed it flawlessly.

Call it what it is: competency porn. And God, we are starving for it. Dying for it.

Because look at everything else.