The Next Moonshot: Universal Basic Income

What Artemis II and the Return to the Moon Should Remind Us About Ending Poverty

As I write this, four astronauts are hurtling toward the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity by its crew. On April 1, 2026, NASA’s Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center — the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in more than fifty years. For the first time since Apollo 17 returned to Earth in December 1972, human beings are returning to the Moon.

Watching that launch, I felt something I haven’t felt in years. I grew up on Star Trek and The Right Stuff. I grew up believing I might one day work on the Moon, or fly a spaceship, or at the very least live in a world that took its cues from the Federation rather than centibillionaires. That feeling where your chest tightens and your eyes sting because you’re watching your species do something extraordinary — that’s what programs like Apollo and Artemis II give me. And it’s that same feeling that drives my work on universal basic income.

The connection between these two things is not merely a metaphor. It is historical.

In August 1969, three days before announcing his Family Assistance Plan — a guaranteed income floor for American families with children — Richard Nixon asked himself why he was doing it. He had doubts. There was no airtight evidence it would work. There was no overwhelming political mandate. There was only the momentum of a decision-making process that had reached the point where it would actually be proposed. He’d already decided. But why?

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan recounted in The Politics of a Guaranteed Income, Nixon’s reasoning came down to three propositions. First, the existing welfare system was destroying the poor, especially the Black poor, and this was becoming the most serious social problem of the time. Second, it was time to bring the South back into the mainstream of American life, and what fundamentally kept the South apart was poverty. Third, it was necessary to prove that government could work — that there was an answer to what Nixon called the “crisis of confidence in the capacity of government to do its job.”

And then Moynihan recorded the crucial line: “The moonshot had been one kind of success; a guaranteed income would be another, at least as important, surely more difficult. America needed some successes.”

Nixon understood something we seem to have forgotten. The Moon landing wasn’t just a technical achievement. It was proof that a democratic government could marshal collective resources, set an audacious goal, and deliver. It restored faith in what we could accomplish together. A guaranteed income, Nixon believed, would do the same — but for the ground beneath our feet rather than the sky above our heads.

He was right. And over half a century later, we still haven’t done it.

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We Choose to Do These Things

When John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University in September 1962, he did not promise that going to the Moon would be simple. He promised the opposite. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” he said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

I look at universal basic income the same way. Ending poverty will not be easy. Restructuring an economy where the top 1% owns nearly a third of all wealth — a record high, per the Federal Reserve — while the bottom half of Americans shares just 2.5% will not be easy. Building the political will to guarantee every person an income floor that prevents them from ever falling into destitution — in a country where we’ve been conditioned to believe that poverty is a moral failing rather than a systemic design choice — will not be easy.

But we can do it. We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the knowledge. We have the economic capacity. We have the wealth. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. What we lack is the political decision to distribute that wealth in a way that reflects our stated values. We could return to the level of inequality we had in the 1970s and the rich would still be rich. But the poor would no longer be in poverty as we presently define it, and the middle class would have the stability it once had.

An economy where 10% of the population consumes 50% of all goods and services is not a strong economy. It is a distorted one. It is an economy oriented around serving the preferences of a small fraction of the population, rather than meeting the needs of all of us. This is destabilizing. It corrodes social trust, weakens democratic participation, and creates the conditions for authoritarianism. It is the economic structure of a society in decline, not one reaching for the stars.

There's a joke that floats around the internet where someone sits down with Karl Marx and explains what the world is like today. They ask him for his analysis. Marx's response is not about capitalism or class struggle. It's: "Holy shit, you went to the Moon?" They try to redirect but Marx won't let it go: "The Moon in the sky?" It's funny because it captures something real. If you could explain our world to anyone from the 19th century — the technology, the productive capacity, the sheer wealth — the most baffling part would not be what we've achieved. It would be what we've chosen not to do with what we've achieved. We went to the Moon. We mapped the human genome. We carry supercomputers in our pockets. And yet tens of millions of Americans live in poverty. That's not a resource problem. It's a decision problem.

The Parable of Two Wolves

There’s a Cherokee parable I love about an elder teaching a child. Inside every person, the elder explains, two wolves are fighting. One is fear, anger, despair. The other is hope, courage, love. The child asks which wolf wins. The elder answers, “The one you feed.”

I think about this constantly. Not just as individuals, but as a civilization — which wolf are we feeding? And why are we doing that?

When we launch astronauts to the Moon, we feed the hopeful wolf. When we invest in science and exploration, when we set goals that seem impossible and then achieve them, we feed the hopeful wolf. When we tell stories about futures worth building — futures without poverty, without hunger, without the quiet desperation of wondering whether you can make rent — we feed the hopeful wolf.

Universal basic income feeds the hopeful wolf too. It says, “We believe everyone deserves to stand on solid ground.” It says, “We have the resources to end poverty, and we choose to end it.” It says, “The purpose of an economy is to serve those who comprise it, not the other way around.”

And I believe these things feed each other. When we envision a future without poverty, a future where every person has the freedom to pursue work that matters most to them, it becomes easier to imagine a future where we explore the galaxy. And when we do hard things like put human beings on the Moon and send them on to Mars, it becomes easier to believe we can do the hard domestic work of guaranteeing economic security for every citizen.

Gene Roddenberry — the man who created Star Trek and, in doing so, gave millions of people like me a vision of what humanity could become — understood this. He built a fictional universe premised on the idea that humanity would outgrow poverty, war, and greed, and that our species would dedicate itself to exploration and betterment. As he put it: “Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it’s not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans.”

That vision mattered. It still matters. It matters because the stories we tell about the future shape the future we build. And right now, we are not telling enough stories like Star Trek. Too much of our science fiction, and too much of our politics, is dystopian. It feeds the fearful wolf. We get The Hunger Games. We get collapse narratives. We get fiction that assumes the worst about human nature and then builds worlds to match. We feed the fearful, angry, despairing wolf.

I want the Star Trek future, not the Hunger Games future. And I believe UBI is one of the key policies that gets us there.

What Exclusion Costs

There is a reason Nixon identified the failure of welfare as one of his three motivations. The traditional welfare system doesn’t just fail to solve poverty — it actively undermines the relationship between citizens and their government, and Nixon knew that because he experienced it himself as a kid.

Think about what means-tested welfare actually requires. You must prove you are poor enough. You must fill out forms, attach supporting documents, submit to interviews, and open your life to bureaucratic scrutiny. You must do this repeatedly. And after all of that, you may be told you don’t qualify, even when you are barely surviving. And if you do get it, you can lose it if you work to increase your income, leaving you potentially worse off. The experience is dehumanizing by design.

Research by Katrina Kosec and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo confirms what this does to how people view their government. Studying Pakistan’s national cash transfer program, they found that when someone in need barely qualifies for assistance, their trust in government increases modestly. But when someone in need barely doesn’t qualify — when they are denied help despite being just as desperate — their trust in government collapses by a far greater magnitude. The negative effect of exclusion dwarfs the positive effect of inclusion. It is enormously more damaging to deny someone help they need than it is beneficial to give someone help they need.

This is the trap of targeted welfare. Every time you draw a line and say “you qualify but you don’t,” you create a person on the wrong side of that line who now has a rational reason to distrust and resent their government. Multiply that by millions of people across hundreds of programs with different eligibility criteria, different renewal periods, different documentation requirements, and you get what we have now — a population that broadly believes government doesn’t work. Not because government can’t work, but because for most people who interact with it at its most critical point of contact, it doesn’t.

Universality solves this. When everyone gets the same floor — the same unconditional income that both prevents poverty and enables participation — no one is excluded. The same goes for universal healthcare. No one is told they’re not poor enough or not deserving enough. No one is forced to prove their suffering to a bureaucrat. The floor is there for everyone, just as the Moon is there for everyone to look up at and dream.

The System of Pulleys

Thomas Paine, that great pamphleteer of the American founding, saw this clearly over two centuries ago. In Agrarian Justice, he argued that every person is owed a share of the common inheritance — the natural resources and accumulated knowledge of civilization — and that government’s role is to ensure that share is paid. He envisioned government not as a punitive institution that sorts the worthy from the unworthy, but as what he called a system of pulleys — a mechanism for lifting everyone, in a way that private charity never can and never will.

Universal basic income is that system of pulleys. It treats every person as having equal rights. It looks at every citizen as a shareholder in the economy they collectively comprise. We are all equal before the law when we all receive the same floor — a floor that both prevents us from falling into poverty and enables us to stand upright and and build on a strong foundation.

This is what our founding documents promise, even if we have never fully delivered. All people are created equal. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. These are not just slogans. They are engineering specifications for a society that we have never finished building.

The Moonshot We Still Haven’t Taken

Artemis II is a reminder. It’s a reminder that we can do extraordinary things when we decide to do them. It’s a reminder that the same country that put human beings on the Moon in 1969 — with less computing power than exists in a modern thermostat — can solve the problem of poverty if it chooses to. We went to the Moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. We should end poverty for the same reason.

Nixon was right to connect these two ambitions. The moonshot proved that government could do something magnificent. A universal basic income would prove that government could do something essential — that it could work not just in the extraordinary and spectacular sense of spaceflight, but in the ordinary, daily, foundational sense of making sure no one in the richest country on Earth ever goes without food, shelter, or dignity.

We are the country that first landed on the Moon. We should also be the country that first abolishes poverty. These are not competing goals. They are the same goal — the goal of a civilization that believes in itself enough to do what is hard and what is right.

The astronauts aboard Integrity are about to travel farther from Earth than any human being has ever gone, breaking the distance record set by Apollo 13. Back here on the ground, tens of millions of Americans are struggling to pay rent, buy groceries, or keep the lights on — not because the wealth doesn’t exist, but because we haven’t decided to share it.

We need to decide. Roddenberry imagined a future where there would be no hunger, no greed, and all the children would grow up to pursue what they most wanted to pursue. That future doesn’t build itself. It gets built by people who choose to feed the hopeful wolf — who insist, against all the cynicism and all the despair, that tomorrow can be better than today.

Going back to the Moon is one way to feed our good wolf. A universal basic income for every American is another. And I believe, as Nixon did in 1969, that doing both is how we prove — to ourselves and to the world — that self-governance works. That democracy can deliver. That a government of the people can actually be for the people.

The moonshot we took in 1969 changed how humanity saw itself. The moonshot we still haven’t taken — the one that ends poverty — would change how we live.

It’s time to take it.

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