Four humans flew around the Moon this month. The first time since 1972. And I genuinely had to fight to find it in my news feed.

The month that should have stopped everyone cold

I think we are living through a genuinely historic stretch of scientific achievement, and the political noise machine is burying it. Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, carrying commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen aboard the Orion spacecraft named Integrity. They flew 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than any human since Apollo 13 in 1970 — and came home safely on April 10, splashing down off San Diego.

Then, eight days later, scientists who spent decades cracking the genetic code of sickle cell disease walked a red carpet in Santa Monica and collected $3 million each. This is not a slow news month. This is a landmark one.

What the Artemis crew actually proved, beyond the photos

I remember watching the Apollo 17 footage as a child, thinking humans would be back on the Moon within a decade. It took 54 years. So when Victor Glover became the first person of color, Christina Koch the first woman, and Jeremy Hansen the first non-American to travel around the Moon, that is not a footnote. That is the story.

The mission broke the record for the farthest distance from Earth traveled by any human, surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The crew witnessed a solar eclipse from space as Orion, the Moon, and the Sun aligned — and used the moment to study the solar corona. Science was happening in real time, 252,000 miles from home.

“We are now falling to the Moon rather than rising away from Earth. It is an amazing milestone!”

— Christina Koch, Artemis II Mission Specialist, NASA

The gene therapy story is even more staggering than the rocket one

On April 18, the 2026 Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica handed out $18.75 million across six prizes. The Life Sciences category alone rewarded three separate teams for gene therapies targeting inherited blindness, sickle cell disease, beta-thalassemia, ALS, and frontotemporal dementia.

The sickle cell prize is the one that should make you stop scrolling. Stuart H. Orkin of Harvard and Swee Lay Thein of the NIH identified the gene BCL11A as the master switch that shuts off fetal hemoglobin after birth. Their work directly enabled Casgevy — the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease — which functionally cures patients of sickle cell disease.

This is genuinely transformative medicine. Sickle cell disease has devastated millions of families, disproportionately in Africa and among Black communities globally, for generations. A one-time therapy that functionally cures it is not incremental progress. It is a civilizational shift.

“After therapy, they're now having a totally new future. And so, it really is transformative.”

— Stuart H. Orkin, MD, Harvard Medical School, 2026 Breakthrough Prize Laureate

The one real problem hiding inside all this good news

Here is where I have to be honest about the bad edge. Casgevy is expensive and takes months of hospitalization to complete. Orkin himself is now working on small molecule pills that could be just as effective at a fraction of the cost. But right now, the cure exists and most of the people who need it cannot access it. That is a policy failure, not a science failure.

Some will argue that celebrating these prizes while the Trump administration proposes cutting NASA science funding by 47% is tone-deaf. I do not buy that argument. Refusing to acknowledge what science has achieved does not protect science budgets. Showing people what is at stake does. The Artemis crew and the Breakthrough laureates are the best possible argument for why funding matters.

The political context is genuinely alarming, though. A Nature analysis published this week found that the Trump administration has terminated more than 100 advisory committees to science agencies. That is not trimming fat. That is dismantling the infrastructure of evidence-based governance.

Why April 2026 deserves to be remembered, not buried

At the time of the Artemis II mission, only about one-fourth of the global population was old enough to have witnessed the previous crewed mission to lunar space, Apollo 17 in 1972. Three-quarters of humanity had never seen this before.

The Breakthrough Prize ceremony, hosted by James Corden at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, brought together Robert Downey Jr., Anne Hathaway, Salma Hayek and dozens of other celebrities alongside the scientists. You can debate whether that spectacle is appropriate. I think it is overdue. Scientists deserve the same cultural visibility as actors.

Would you trust a civilization that cures sickle cell disease and flies to the Moon in the same month, then immediately defunds the institutions that made both possible? Because that is exactly what is happening. April 2026 gave us the receipts for what science can do. The question now is whether we are serious enough to protect it.