Sunita Williams has finally retired after 27 years at NASA, a career that essentially served as the world’s most expensive and prolonged attempt to avoid human interaction. While the press releases are currently choking on their own syrupy adjectives—using words like ‘pioneer,’ ‘hero,’ and ‘trailblazer’—let’s look at the reality through a lens not clouded by government-funded nostalgia. Williams spent 600 days in orbit across three missions. That is nearly two years of floating in a pressurized tin can, drinking recycled sweat, and staring at the Earth from 250 miles away. Honestly, given the current state of terrestrial discourse, I’m surprised she ever bothered to come back at all. To call her a hero is to ignore the obvious: she was simply the only person with the budget and the clearance to successfully execute the ultimate social distancing protocol.

Her career culminated in the recent Boeing Starliner test flight, an event that perfectly encapsulates the pathetic state of modern achievement. Boeing, a corporation that has recently reinvented itself as a manufacturer of airborne debris and executive bonuses, managed to turn a simple ‘test flight’ into a high-stakes cosmic hostage situation. Williams and her colleague were essentially stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) because the lowest bidder’s software and hardware decided to have a collective nervous system failure. In the eyes of the public, this was a ‘mission extension’ and an opportunity for ‘valuable data collection.’ In the eyes of anyone with a functioning frontal lobe, it was a multi-billion dollar metal coffin that couldn't manage a return trip without risking a total hull breach. Yet, in our infinite capacity for delusion, we celebrate the fact that she survived Boeing’s incompetence as if it were a planned part of the curriculum.

Then there are the records. She set records for spacewalks and time in orbit for a woman. We live in an age so obsessed with identity and categorization that we have to slice every achievement into a demographic pie just to feel something. The Left will parade her as a symbol of 'representation' in STEM, completely ignoring the fact that she spent three decades as a high-ranking officer in the military-industrial complex, a cog in the very machine they claim to despise. They’ll tweet about her ‘glass ceiling’ while she was literally standing above the atmosphere, oblivious to the irony that her ‘trailblazing’ did absolutely nothing to fix the crumbling schools or the systemic mediocrity of the planet she left behind. Meanwhile, the Right will wrap her in the flag, using her face to sell a brand of ‘American Exceptionalism’ that hasn't existed since we stopped being able to build a functional subway system, let alone a reliable rocket.

Let’s talk about the ISS itself—that billion-dollar monument to international cooperation and scientific futility. For decades, we have poured resources into this floating laboratory so we can conduct vital experiments, such as seeing how spiders spin webs in microgravity or how long a human can survive on a diet of vacuum-sealed mush. We are told these missions ‘pave the way’ for Mars. Pave the way for what? So we can export our vapid culture and our ruinous political squabbles to a cold, red rock? The idea that we are going to ‘save’ humanity by moving it to another planet is the height of arrogance. If we can’t stop ourselves from lighting our own home on fire, what makes anyone think we won’t just bring the matches to the next one? Williams wasn't paving a path to the future; she was just an advanced janitor for a project that has become a bloated, orbiting metaphor for our refusal to deal with reality.

Williams’ retirement is being hailed as the ‘end of an era,’ but that implies the era was going somewhere. In truth, it’s just the closing of a chapter in a very long, very expensive book that no one is actually reading. She returns to a world that is louder, dumber, and more divided than the one she first left in the late nineties. She trades the silence of the vacuum for the cacophony of 24-hour cable news and the shrill, performative outrage of social media. After 600 days of looking down at the globe and seeing no borders, she’s back on the ground where we’ve drawn lines in the dirt over things as trivial as which bathroom a person uses or which geriatric millionaire should be allowed to run the country into the ground next.

Welcome back to Earth, Sunita. You’ve traded the majesty of the cosmos for the misery of the commute. You’ve traded the risk of explosive decompression for the certainty of cognitive decay. You’ve spent 27 years trying to reach the stars, only to realize that the only thing waiting for us out there is more of the same vacuum we have between our ears. It’s a pity, really. If I were her, I would have stayed on the ISS, cut the comms, and waited for the battery to die. At least then, the last thing she’d have heard wasn't a politician trying to take credit for her oxygen supply.