To the Moon Again
If you’re not into following space news, amidst our current dystopian news cycle, it can be easy to miss. NASA’s Artemis II mission launches in February this year, a month away, and four astronauts are going to orbit the moon and come home. The mission is parallel to the Apollo 8 mission in 1968; it’s not a landing mission. It’s a test flight as part of the lead up to landing again with Artemis III.
But I don’t care. Landing is cool. But even cooler to me, is that humanity didn’t give up on human space travel and is going back to the moon at all.
As a writer and a dreamer, I am all in on the romanticism of humans traveling the stars. I grew up on Star Trek, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, and the Stargate shows. I love the differentness of thinking of what alien life might look like, how other planets and ecosystems would be, how the science fiction I grew up reading, optimistic or otherwise, wondered about humanity’s place in the universe and challenged our views of ourselves.
Artemis II Crew, from left to right: Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA crewmates Christina Koch, Victor Glover and mission commander Reid Wiseman. Credit: NASA
As a science nerd and non-fiction enthusiast, I am constantly astounded by all the things NASA and other space agencies have learned about living in microgravity and stars, nebulas, and exoplanets that we had no idea to even ask about. Who knew that microgravity would affect astronaut’s vision the way it does, or that astronauts get so used to letting go and letting objects float that they forget and drop things all the time when they come home? Who knew that the model for our solar system is not common, that exoplanets made of diamond exist, or other strange and configurations are just as normal.
Until we looked with Hubble and Webb, we didn’t know. Until we lived in space on the International Space Station for 25 years, we didn’t know. Until we sent orbiters and rovers to the moon and Mars and they found ice, we didn’t know.
That’s why I’m so excited about Artemis II. Being there is the next step to learning more, through experience, looking, touching, feeling.
And it’s just really effing cool.
