To the Moon

Artemis II has me excited about space again. Humans are going back to the Moon — crew on board, not just hardware — and it’s the first time that’s happened since Apollo. It hits different when there are people in the capsule.

It also happens to coincide with a new season of For All Mankind, which feels almost too perfect. Between the real mission and the show, I’ve been thinking about space constantly.

And it’s not just For All Mankind. Space storytelling is everywhere right now in a way it hasn’t been in years. Interstellar is still filling IMAX theatres a full decade after release. My watch list is half space documentaries. My feed is full of people talking about orbital mechanics like it’s normal dinner conversation. For All Mankind works specifically because it asks “what if we never stopped going?” — and now, with Artemis, reality is starting to catch up to that question.

I think what makes this land so hard for me is generational. I was born twenty-six years after the last Apollo mission. The Shuttle was winding down by the time I was old enough to pay attention, and after Columbia it just sort of… stopped. Space, for my entire life, has been robotic. Rovers on Mars, Hubble deep fields, ISS live streams — extraordinary, but always at a distance. There were never people in the frame. Artemis II is the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit that I’ve experienced as something real and present, not as archive footage with a narrator over the top. That changes what it means.

When the media and reality line up like this, it does something to the collective imagination that neither can do alone. Apollo had its own version of that — the whole country watching a single screen, holding its breath. I wonder sometimes if part of what I’m feeling is nostalgia for a moment I never lived through, a longing for the kind of shared attention that probably can’t exist anymore in the same way. But people are paying attention anyway. People who don’t normally care about space are asking questions about lunar orbits and re-entry speeds. It’s not Apollo-scale unity, but it’s real.

None of that is really the point, though. The point is simpler than any of the analysis. It’s just the feeling of watching a countdown and believing, for the first time in a long time, that something extraordinary is about to happen.

To the Moon.