Áilín Quinlan: From Moon landing to lunacy, how the mighty U.S has fallen

Apart from reminding me of the time one of my brothers bounced down the stairs on a space-hopper and crashed into the glass panel of the front door, the Artemis II adventure has left me cold.

I was only a wee thing when Neil Armstrong exited Apollo 11 to leave his boot-print in the moondust, but I recall the huge sense of excitement and awe, the plastic space rockets, the miniature astronauts.

A few years later, we were all bouncing around on big rubber orange space-hoppers, which, I believed all my life, were inspired by the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon Landing.

In comparison, the Artemis II mission just didn’t seem to cut it, despite all the hype. Just didn’t blow my mind.

I ended up researching the history of the space-hopper, which I have always associated with the Apollo 11 mission.

To my dismay, I discovered that they had absolutely nothing at all to do with Neil or Buzz.

The idea actually predated the Apollo 11 mission. What really happened was that a man called Aquilino Cosani got a brainwave for the toy while he was watching a TV documentary about kangaroos some time in the early 1960s. He called his toy the Pon-Pon.

By the 1970s, which is when that death-defying bounce down the stairs, across the hall and straight into the glass of our front door took place, the space-hopper was a world phenomenon.

Interestingly – and something else I didn’t know – it wasn’t called a space-hopper in America. They called theirs The Hoppity Hop.

So while it didn’t have anything to do with the invention of the space-hopper, I would argue that the 1969 Moon landing could easily have inspired this iconic toy.

America back then was perceived as a bastion of progress and decency and scientific pioneering; exactly the kind of nation whose achievements could imaginably form the inspiration for an innocent child’s toy. America was a revered place, the Land of the Free. Parents and grandparents spoke about it in tones of respect.

One of my grandmothers had a big picture of President John F Kennedy on the wall; the other displayed a little silvery lunar module of some kind on her mantelpiece.

The Moon landing and the subsequent visit by the astronauts to Buckingham Palace features in TV series The Crown. The happiness and awe, the sheer excitement, around Apollo 11 and the Moon landing could so easily have inspired the big, joyous orange ball with the horned handles!

Artemis II, however, has launched from a much bleaker place.

America is a now-fearsome land stalked by armed ICE agents. A country where terrified little children are detained on their way home from school by masked, gun-wielding ICE agents. A place where U.S citizens are shot in broad daylight by those same government agents. A place of detention camps. A place that bars entry to visitors depending on what’s contained in their social media – and a destination that an ever-increasing number of tourists are knocking off their bucket lists.

There are those social media rants from the President with the caps lock on. The blatant misogyny and racism. The profanity-laced social media post referencing Allah on Easter Sunday. This talk of holy wars. The schizophrenic Alice In Wonderland atmosphere that now seems to dominate the White House and everything to do with it.

America has, in effect, become a kind of North Korea.

It’s a place where the phrase ‘off with their heads’ is not a funny sentence from a satiric fairytale, as former attorney general Pam Bondi has discovered.

Like other die-hard Trump loyalists, Kristi Noem, the former U.S Secretary of Homeland Security, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s first National Security Advisor this term, Bondi learned that doing what you’re told doesn’t save you. Standing by your man doesn’t save you either.

On the frontline, grocery bills are climbing. The price of petrol has shot up, and there’s talk of rationing.

The war is costing the U.S Exchequer an estimated €1 billion a day, money which Trump seems very happy to spend - a year, just one year, after thousands of federal staff were placed on administrative leave or fired to save money in a highly publicised drive by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.

The lack of stability is reflected in sackings, sackings, and more sackings. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War and former TV personality, has reportedly fired about 20 generals since he came into office.

None of this speaks to the America we used to know. This new America is a byword for instability. Chaos. Paranoia. Hostility.

A recent survey found that in Spain, only 39% see the USA as friendly. In Germany, it’s 41%. Over in Denmark, unsurprisingly given its links to Greenland, only 26% of people see the U.S as friendly. Only about one third of people in Germany, France, and the UK now hold a favourable view of the U.S.

There’s the apprehension in your throat every morning now as you turn on the news. You’re wondering if some new terror has been unleashed because Mr Trump got bored or mad or lost patience while the rest of us slept, and pressed a button to invade some place that annoyed him, or rain hellfire on some new and unsuspecting part of the world.

The mission of Artemis II holds neither excitement nor joy for me. Those astronauts on board had better watch what they say, or the mission will be turned into yet another distraction.

An American friend put it like this. At the start of his term, some 15 months ago (is it really only 15 months? It seems like 15 years), every utterance by Trump was pored over. But horror-fatigue, shock-fatigue, and outrage-fatigue set in long ago.

Now it’s down to just fatigue. To waiting him out and wondering hopelessly what we’ll wake up to tomorrow morning. The Sword of Damocles hangs over us.

What a long way from the joyful innocence of space-hoppers we have come.