Deftones and Space: Crafting Humanity’s Cosmic Friendship

Biscuit

02 Jan 2026 — 4 min read

Photo by Christian Liebel (Unsplash), Edited/Rendered by gpt-image-1

Deftones recently partnered with GOAL Projects to support youth soccer in Sacramento, releasing special jerseys for the Los Jaguares team. Meanwhile, NASA's preparing to send humans back to the moon with their upcoming Artemis III mission. Two stories that hit the news cycle recently, seemingly unrelated except for one beautiful truth: both are about humans deciding that the best thing we can do with our success is create spaces where other people can reach higher.

There's something deeply moving about Chino Moreno and his bandmates—guys who spent decades grinding through dive bars and van tours—choosing to support programs where kids can find community after school. They're not trying to create the next Deftones. They're building connections with the same weird kids who might grow up to design lunar habitats or write the algorithms that help us navigate asteroid fields.

The Beautiful Mundanity of Going Big

Here's what kills me about both these stories: they're simultaneously the most ambitious and most ordinary things humans do. Supporting youth programs? That's what successful people have done since forever—Andrew Carnegie with his libraries, Jane Addams with Hull House. Going to the moon? We literally already did that, your grandfather probably watched it on TV. But the fact that we keep doing these things, keep building these bridges between where we are and where we could be, that's the whole entire point of being human.

The Artemis mission isn't just about planting flags or collecting rocks. It's about establishing humanity's next foothold, creating infrastructure that future missions can build upon. The Deftones partnership works the same way—it's infrastructure for dreams, a physical space where potential gets to become real.

What connects these stories isn't their scale but their faith in compound interest. Not the financial kind (though sure, that too), but the human kind. Every kid who finds their place on a soccer team becomes someone who might help three other kids find theirs. Every successful moon landing makes Mars feel a little less impossible. This is how civilization actually works, creating conditions where achievement becomes inevitable.

The Grassroots Galaxy

The most punk rock thing about space exploration might be how collaborative it's become. Modern space missions involve partnerships across companies, countries, and universities. It's basically a massive group project where everyone brings their specific weird expertise to the table. A cosmic potluck where instead of casseroles, everyone brings rocket components.

The Deftones get this. Their partnership isn't just them writing checks—they're connecting with organizations that already know how to reach kids, how to create spaces where young people can belong. It's collaboration that recognizes everyone has their role, and the magic happens in the spaces between.

This is the part that makes me want to stand up and cheer: we're watching the death of the lone genius myth in real-time. The future isn't Tony Stark in his garage; it's more like a really well-organized Discord server where someone's good at thermodynamics and someone else knows how to get permits from the city council and somehow they're building something impossible together.

Small Steps and Power Chords

There's this moment sometimes in Deftones shows where Moreno stops singing and just lets the crowd carry the melody. Thousands of strangers suddenly become a single voice, holding a note together in the dark. It's the same feeling you get watching footage of Mission Control during a launch—all these separate people becoming one organism focused on a single goal.

The kids who'll benefit from that Sacramento partnership might never become rock stars. Most of them won't. But they'll learn what it feels like to be part of something bigger than themselves, to find their place in a team. Some of them might end up at NASA, designing life support systems or programming navigation software. The connection isn't metaphorical—it's literal. The same brain that learns to work with others toward a common goal can learn to solve problems that haven't been solved before.

We're living through this incredible moment where the biggest things humans can imagine—colonizing other planets, restructuring society, defeating death itself—are happening simultaneously with the smallest, most intimate gestures of care. A band supports kids playing soccer after school. A space agency that once pledged to land the first woman on the Moon is still pushing ahead with plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface. Both are acts of radical optimism, declarations that the future is worth investing in.

The Friendship Frequency

What we're really talking about here is friendship at scale. The Deftones are essentially saying, "We made it, and now we want to be friends with our whole city." NASA's saying, "We want humanity to be friends with the cosmos." Both require the same fundamental belief: that strangers are just friends you haven't met yet, that the universe is basically hospitable to human dreams if you bring the right equipment and enough snacks.

The Los Jaguares will keep playing. Artemis III will eventually launch. Between now and then, kids in Sacramento will learn teamwork, make friends who actually get them, discover what they're capable of when someone believes in them. Engineers will run ten thousand simulations, test every component twice, triple-check their math. All of it—every practice, every rocket test—is part of the same project: making room for each other to become more than we currently are.

What stays with me is this: you don't have to go to the moon or start a band to be part of this. Every time you share what you know, every time you create a space where someone else can grow, you're participating in the same fundamental human project. We're all building the infrastructure for each other's dreams, one small kindness at a time.