There is a specific brand of terrestrial delusion that likes to use the word 'inspired' whenever a human being manages to survive the catastrophic failure of their own species' engineering. The latest recipient of this backhanded compliment is Sunita Williams, an Indian-American astronaut who recently concluded a 27-year career with NASA by spending 600 cumulative days floating in a pressurized tin can because the people on the ground couldn't figure out how to bring her home. To the unwashed masses and the professional cheerleaders in the media, Williams is a 'trailblazer.' To anyone with a functioning frontal lobe, she is the ultimate metaphor for our collective desire to be literally anywhere else but here.

Her final mission—a 'spontaneous' 286-day residency aboard the International Space Station—is being framed as a record-breaking achievement in endurance. Let’s be clear: 'spontaneous' is the word public relations ghouls use when a multi-billion-dollar aerospace conglomerate like Boeing realizes their spacecraft is effectively a decorative lawn ornament once it leaves the atmosphere. Williams didn't choose to stay; she was sequestered by the vacuum of space and the sheer, staggering incompetence of terrestrial corporate logistics. She spent nearly a year orbiting a planet currently obsessed with its own self-immolation, watching the borders of nations from a distance where their petty grievances look as microscopic as they actually are. One wonders if, while looking down at the swirling clouds of the Americas or the smog-choked horizons of Asia, she felt a sense of peace or merely the crushing realization that she eventually had to come back to this asylum.

NASA, an organization that has transitioned from the bold frontier-pushing of the 1960s into a glorified landlord for the low-Earth orbit, celebrates Williams for establishing new benchmarks for female spacewalks. It’s a classic move: when the technology fails and the mission parameters dissolve into chaos, pivot to identity politics and 'milestones.' The vacuum of space, notably, is the only truly egalitarian environment left to us; it treats a decorated female commander with the exact same lethal indifference it would show a billionaire tech-bro or a career politician. The cosmic radiation doesn't care about your demographic profile, yet we insist on layering our primitive social hierarchies onto the void. We are told to find her 600 days in the cosmos 'extraordinary,' as if the sheer duration of her exile makes the malfunctioning hardware she was trapped in any less of an embarrassment.

From a cynical perspective—the only perspective worth having—Williams’ career is a masterclass in the slow decay of the Enlightenment project. We once went to the moon because we thought it was the next step in our evolution. Now, we send people to the ISS so they can fix leaking toilets and perform 'experiments' that largely consist of seeing how long it takes for a human being to lose their mind while eating rehydrated sludge. The 286-day extension was not a triumph of the human spirit; it was a stay of execution from the drudgery of Earth. While we argue over which flavor of authoritarianism we prefer in our upcoming elections or which corporate overlord gets to strip-mine our privacy next, Williams was safely tucked away in the interstellar purgatory of the ISS. Perhaps the most 'inspiring' part of her journey is the fact that she stayed away for so long. Who wouldn’t want to be 250 miles above the nearest YouTube comment section?

As she hangs up her flight suit after nearly three decades, the accolades pour in from both sides of the political aisle, each attempting to claim her success as a victory for their specific brand of nationalistic or progressive exceptionalism. The Right will point to her as a symbol of American dominance, ignoring the fact that the 'dominance' in question currently relies on the mercy of commercial contractors who can’t keep a valve shut. The Left will celebrate her as a pioneer of representation, ignoring that the representation occurs within a military-industrial framework that prioritizes orbital optics over actual terrestrial progress. In reality, Sunita Williams is a woman who spent 600 days looking at the world from the outside, which is the only way any sane person could possibly tolerate it. She didn’t just break records; she survived the relentless gravity of our stupidity for longer than almost anyone else in history. Welcome back to Earth, Sunita. It’s exactly as broken as you left it, only now the people who broke it expect you to tell them how beautiful it looked from the window of a broken ship.