For just a little while last week, most everyone was friends again.
Artemis II came back safely from the first trip around the moon in the modern era, and people from around the world watched and waited. A friend of mine in Africa whose kids normally are in bed early had the family crowded around a cell phone watching. I later ran into someone with whom I have rarely agreed. I steeled myself for one of our sometimes contentious debates, but instead he shook my hand and asked if I had watched the capsule land on Friday night.
We both grew up on Apollo, and until Challenger and Columbia we took space travel almost for granted. The race between Elon Musk and Blue Origin drew little more than a passing, academic interest for me, even after a friend’s son went to work for SpaceX.
I can’t say space travel had become boring, but it was just kind of … there. Sure, we followed the International Space Station, and shivered, sweated and slapped skeeters waiting to see it come by. The same thing went for the Starlink satellites, which I will admit were both eerie and cool to see lined up across the night sky like a visitor from another planet.
But for the most part, space was really no big deal anymore.
Until Artemis.
As someone who has been referred to as a malevolently fiscal conservative, it may seem odd that I’m cool with spending billions of dollars to explore the possibility of landing on the moon, or maybe even going further. It’s not like I personally will ever get the opportunity to go, but I hope and pray that the children and grandchildren of my generation can look to the stars and dream about going there.
As I noted, I am a child of the Apollo era. Teachers rolled TVs into our classrooms to watch launches and splashdowns. It still amuses me that my mother had to sign a permission slip for me to be able to watch one of the missions in class; all our parents did. Now a teacher just logs onto the Internet and the “chalk” board becomes a screen.
A lot of us now worried whether there will be Social Security in a few years were once hoping to someday hop on a space shuttle and visit space. What we would do there was never entirely clear, but we wanted to go.
I even had the GI Joe lunar capsule; I found it behind the bushes at an abandoned house a few blocks from ours. The space suit was even shoved down inside the capsule. I sincerely hope Joe had some other clothes, but I was grateful to have the gear for my own Joe. Like so many toys we now consider collectible, I have no idea whatever happened to my space capsule; as many times as I repaired it with model airplane glue, however, I doubt even the most desperate collector would consider it valuable now.
So many folks have forgotten Skylab, but I remember being amazed as it was constructed in space. A friend’s grandmother hosted a party for us kids when Skylab crashed back to earth. We were glued to the TV and a radio while Skylab’s path was tracked, and when the announcer said it was over North Carolina, we looked like the Three Stooges as we all tried to go out the door at the same time. Whether or not what we saw was the remains of Skylab or not, I cannot say for sure, but we were convinced it was.
Space was going to be the new frontier for my generation, a new place to explore and settle, the setting for stories and legends to be told centuries after we were long dead and buried — possibly after we were even buried on some distant planet in another galaxy.
But when I was a lonely, chubby kid, the dream carried me deep into outer space and back again; our back yard was the universe, and at night it wasn’t hard to imagine distant galaxies, since there wasn’t as much light pollution and the stars blinked disinterestedly at a little boy trying to identify constellations.
I revisited that GI Joe capsule and a dozen other memories the other night as Artemis came through the atmosphere at temperatures even Southerners can’t imagine. I remembered halfway pretending to be sick one day so I could stay home and watch the shuttle being transferred across the country on the back of an airplane. I thought about the moon rock displays at the Smithsonian, when Papa and I went there on one of our special visits. True, they were just rocks, but they were from the moon.
As the seconds ticked off and the parachutes opened, slowing Artemus’ descent, I remembered watching Challenger die on a cold Florida morning, and driving up a country road with my wife when a radio announcer broke in and talked about Columbia exploding. A few days later I did a story on a man who found what turned out to be debris from Columbia, all the way down here in Southeastern North Carolina.
Artemis splashed down safely into the Pacific Friday night, and for just a little while, we weren’t as worried about the wars in Iran and elsewhere, the looming tax deadline, the latest government scandal, or how to be sure the bills would be paid this month.
For just a little while, I was a little kid again, dreaming of outer space, fiercely proud to be an American, amazed that man was once again looking above the problems of Earth and wondering what it would take to aim for the stars.
