The world is a dumpster fire at the moment. Fuel prices are continually rising due to increasing global instability. Climate change is clearly and undeniably manifesting, as a sweeping far-right movement in key countries is stripping civil liberties from its citizens. Meanwhile, an unstable US president has alienated key allies as he engages Iran in a reckless new war of his choosing. This is not too unlike the world in 1968, when a similarly unpopular (and costly) war raged in Southeast Asia, while the Civil Rights movement in the United States was entering a crucible, with the assassinations of several inspiring leaders, and the slow emergence of newly minted personal freedoms (many of which are in peril now). There was a pervading sense of hopelessness then, and that feeling is magnified now, as new, unprecedented existential crises are seemingly thrown at us every day.

Back in 1968, there was a moment where much of the world came together, if only for a few days, with the lunar-orbiting mission of Apollo 8, as astronauts Frank Borman, the recently passed Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to see the Earth rising over the moon with their own eyes. That historic image, later called “Earthrise,” became famous; in 1979, it was the cover of my 7th grade history book. That image, like many that followed in the Apollo program (1967-1975) reminded us that despite our differences and conflicts, we share a single, fragile, borderless planet with only a thin envelope of air and a magnetic field protecting us from the dark, hostile void of space. That photo, for a time anyway, reinforced the notion that we are a single planet, and we are a single species living on it, despite religious, cultural or geographical differences. For a brief time, it was a ‘day the Earth stood still.’ Earth even posed for a portrait. I would later hang a poster of Earth taken from Apollo 17 (the last manned lunar landing mission) on my bedroom wall as a teenager.

I was only five years-old when Apollo’s moon landing program–with its ghostly TV images of astronauts bobbing about on the lunar surface–ended. However, I do vaguely remember the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in space, as astronauts aboard the last flying Apollo command module rendezvoused and docked with a Russian Soyuz ferry craft (which are still in service) for a handshake in orbit, with a shared meal served out of toothpaste tubes. Inspired by the detente between the United States and the then-Soviet Union, this mission would lead to greater cooperation with post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, using the Space Shuttle and Mir space station. This would culminate in the International Space Station; a place where astronauts work together for space science (independent of politics) and as a tenuous reminder of what can happen when we cooperate for mutual goals. The station is due to be de-orbited in the next decade (its aging core components were launched in the late 1990s), and there are no plans for an equivalent replacement, as current global hostilities continue to escalate.

Despite its dead-end technology and dangerous run (two spectacularly fatal accidents in 1986 and 2003), I remember building detailed models of the Space Shuttle as a teenager. It was shortly after watching the horror of the Challenger explosion on TV that sunny January morning in 1986 that my infatuation with the shuttle plummeted. Before 1986, I used to have random nightmares about the space shuttle having a fatal accident, but they weren’t quite as horrific as the real thing. Challenger’s destruction changed me a bit, and I began shifting my interests away from manned spaceflights towards robotic missions, which were doing the heavy lifting in space exploration, but with far less risk. The spectacular color images of the Martian surface from the Viking landers in the summer of 1976 already whetted my appetite as a kid, while the Voyager flybys in the outer solar system filled me with genuine wonder I’d never felt before. In 1997, at age 30, I joined The Planetary Society to keep my space dreams alive as I worked a miserable job to support myself. I’ve been a member ever since. I became convinced that robotic missions, such as Cassini/Huygens to Saturn, or the various Mars rovers, or the recent launch of the Europa Clipper, were the sole future for space exploration. That old perspective of mine recently changed.

In 2015, while attending San Diego Comic Con in my old Fred Flintstone cosplay, I eagerly sat through a panel for a new movie called “The Martian,” based on the book I’d just finished from author Andy Weir, who was attending the panel. Meeting Weir after the panel, I also ran into a newly minted NASA astronaut from the event named Victor Glover (in his blue NASA jumpsuit); a then-rookie who had yet to fly his first mission. I asked if we could pose for a photo together (“the spaceman and the caveman”). Glover beamed a big smile and said, “Let’s do it!” From then on, I would follow his career, as he flew the first crewed Dragon capsule and would later spend six months aboard the space station. Then came Project Artemis. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo (I see and like what you did there, NASA…). I assumed Artemis would be another in a stop/start series of planned lunar missions that went nowhere (anyone remember Constellation?). American presidents love to talk about manned spaceflight, but are a lot more skittish when it came to funding it beyond Earth orbit. Artemis, however, was different.

Surviving both Democrat and Republican administrations, momentum for Artemis slowly but steadily built after a successful unmanned flight test of its Orion command module in December of 2022, which flew around the moon on a free-return trajectory (similar to Artemis 2’s flight profile). That Orion splashed down in the Pacific on December 11th, but with substantial damage to its heat shield. After tweaks of the capsule, it was deemed safe for humans. So, on April 1st of this year, mission Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover (yay!), mission specialist Christina Koch (the first woman beyond Earth orbit!) and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen (the first Canadian beyond Earth orbit!) blasted off in the Artemis 2 spaceship, its Orion capsule designated “Integrity” mounted atop the massive SLS booster stack.

Like many others around the world, I found myself unexpectedly caught up in this new strain of moon fever. My cynical side went out for a walk and never came back, as I realized this would be the second time in my 59-year life that humans were flying to the moon. Most mornings, I take walks to my local park to manage my arthritis, and I often see and sometimes photograph the various lunar phases. Yesterday morning, I caught myself glancing upward, realizing that gibbous moon I saw had been visited by human ambassadors from Earth for the first time since my wife was an 11-month old toddler. That sense of awe for manned spaceflight I felt in my childhood and teen years had largely evaporated after Challenger. Now it came roaring back with a vengeance. I find myself taking screenshots off my iPad from live press conferences with the astronauts in space, or whenever new images were made public. Most recently, Integrity completed its flyby of the moon’s far side (not visible from Earth), where the spacecraft’s position relative to the moon and sun allowed for a spectacular lunar/solar eclipse, visible only to the crew–the first humans to see this side of the moon since December of 1972. With the crew’s consent, a newly discovered crater on the lunar far side was named after Commander Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, who died from cancer in 2020; a beautiful moment that truly humanized this crew, who represent a number of space firsts by their mere presence.

The farthest point in Integrity’s free-return trajectory around the moon beat the distance record inadvertently set by the troubled Apollo 13‘s flight path 56 years ago this month (by roughly 4,000 miles/6500 km). This furthest distance record from the moon’s surface means the Artemis 2 crew have truly “gone where no one has gone before.” After an awkward phone conversation from space between the crew and NASA budget-slashing president Trump (Canadian astronaut Hansen understandably refused to speak with him), the astronauts are, as of this writing, currently headed home. The Integrity is scheduled to jettison its service module (with its exhausted fuel supply and unneeded solar panels), before splashing down in the Pacific this Friday around 5 pm PST. The service module will harmlessly burn up upon reentry with Earth’s atmosphere.

After seeing the deaths of 14 astronauts aboard space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, I can’t help feeling some anxiety for Friday’s scheduled splashdown. My wife and I are attending a play this Friday, but before the show begins, you can safely bet I’ll be watching the splashdown on my iPhone with earbuds. I’ve got moon fever bad. With that, I sincerely hope the Artemis 2 returns home safe and sound this Friday, and I won’t fully exhale until I see all four crew members aboard the USS John P. Murtha, especially Victor Glover. I will never forget our brief-but-memorable San Diego Comic Con encounter, when he graciously posed for my picture of “the spaceman with the caveman.” I’m not a religious person, but the Artemis 2 crew pulled off a minor miracle by allowing us to put aside doom-scrolling long enough to look up into the sky and see something greater for a change. We really needed that.

I’ll end this column with a quote from Glover, during an Easter Sunday spent in space:

“I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist (in) together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about all the cultures all around the world —whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not — this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are and that we are the same thing. And that we got to get through this together.”