Growing up, Apollo was basically mythology to me. Not in a bad way, just in a way that seemed a bit foreign given that all I saw from NASA was the Space Shuttle. For my entire life, humans just hadn’t gone back to the Moon after Apollo. The greatest adventure our species ever pulled off had stopped, and nobody picked it back up. I followed Shuttle launches, building of the ISS, and loved all of it, but it wasn’t the same. The Moon was right there, and we just kept not going. Not because it was impossible, because it was expensive.
So while I kept an eye on things over at NASA, let’s be honest, a lot of the fun stuff has been happening at SpaceX as compared to SLS, which seemed to be in a cycle of never-ending delays. It was great to see Artemis I actually get off the pad in 2022, but it’s one thing to send a capsule up, it’s another to send people. When Artemis II was announced I was skeptical, but at least it was progress in the right direction. Well, that was put to bed two weeks ago when they finally got off the ground. I was glued to the live stream, and comparing the high-resolution video we have today to the grainy Apollo footage I spent years re-watching was a night and day difference.
I spent the better part of the last two weeks checking the live stream, looking for photos from the crew, and just trying to keep up and know what the next major milestone was in the mission plan. It was amazing to be able to not just watch this as a relic from the past but instead something that was happening in real time.
There’s something else I keep coming back to, a direct comparison with Apollo, the timing. Apollo 8 launched in December of 1968, which by all accounts was a rough year. Assassinations, riots, a country that felt like it was tearing itself apart at the seams. People were exhausted and angry and deeply unsure about where things were headed. Fifty-some years later, it’s hard not to draw a straight line to now — a country split down the middle, an economy that feels like it’s barely holding together, AI eating jobs and headlines in equal measure, wars grinding on that never needed to happen.
But back then, three guys strapped into a rocket, flew to the Moon, and on Christmas Eve read from Genesis while a photograph called Earthrise showed humanity what we looked like from out there. The context, the chaos of 1968, what it meant for the world is so perfectly captured in From the Earth to the Moon. It’s an HBO miniseries Tom Hanks produced in the late 90s, and it’s one of the best things ever made about the space program.
Watching a rocket lift four people off the ground and send them around the Moon this week did something that I didn’t expect. When they came back with new photos taken by human eyes that hadn’t been that close in over half a century, it felt a lot like relief. Like, oh good, we’re still doing this. And seeing that kind of reaction from people online, news outlets, and even just my friends and family asking about the mission (knowing that I would know what’s going on) felt like maybe this space stuff isn’t just important for science but for humanity overall.
Artemis II splashed down today. Everyone’s safe. The mission was a success. While the next mission, Artemis III, won’t leave Earth orbit, it really doesn’t matter because it’s all about the progress. I can’t wait to see people on the Moon again.