Moonshot

When I was a kid and both observed and was told about the “Man on the Moon” pareidolic phenomenon in which during full moons it looked as if there was a face staring down at Earth. For some reason in the way kids misunderstand simple concepts and turns of phrase I coupled this with the knowledge that humanity had in fact landed on the moon before. Combined, I thought that whenever the lunar surface was fully waxed as such that there was actually a man on the moon every month. Eventually as I grew in both size and age and brain I came to the accurate conclusion that this was not the case, and that the moon hasn’t had humans on it since my dad was a toddler in the early 1970’s.

Along with much of the nation and world, I have found myself enamored by the recent Artemis II mission. I’m no stranger to nerding out over space achievements. On Christmas morning in 2021 my wife and I watched from our living room the James Webb Space Telescope launch from Guiana and I diligently followed its delicate positioning and unfolding sequence over the following weeks. One might call me a ‘fair weather space nerd’ in the same way I’m a fair weather Philly sports fan, where I seem to get deeply emotionally involved only once the stakes become high. Which might explain why the unmanned Artemis I mission flew completely under my radar. Artemis II on the other hand, I was watching with bated breath the whole 9 day mission. My wife and I watched the launch. Each morning I would check the live stream. 15 minutes before splashdown my heart rate according to my watch was a rapid 160bpm. To say I was invested is an understatement. Ingesting both non-fiction like The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe and fictional like the Apple TV show For All Mankind I am becoming more fixated on Space, the history of NASA, the Space Race, early missions, and enjoying the current and future of the Artemis missions and the hype it has created in the hope it continues stirring.

It feels so typical, as I imagine any child dreams, of course the first job I ever wanted was to be an Astronaut. I remember some dumb little colored pencil art project I made where I envisioned myself as a suited Cosmonaut amongst the stars. Learning everything easy I could about Space like using the bathroom, or what the parts of the ISS were. Little interest in the hard stuff needed like math or physics and physical fitness or mental fortitude. Unfortunately the trajectory of my life hit a much more, mediocre target. It’s the worst time to be a 33-year-old man with a child-like wonder and wandering ambition. I have such a newfound appreciation for the mental fortitude and courage it takes to be a modern explorer in the least hospitable place known to man.

The entire space program is the pinnacle built on top of a pyramid of science, technology, engineering, Art, and math. I would like to take a moment to highlight the A for Art in STEAM over the typical STEM educational initiative. Stems are stagnant. They sit wavering in the wind, at best a pillar for branching off of. Steam on the other hand is power, steam moves us forward. The importance of the resulting Art in the form of photography from Artemis II almost feels like a huge part of the reportage of this mission. My background as a photographer leaves me clearly biased, but in some ways Art and Photography could be argued to be one of the most important parts of this mission in order to enable Artemis’s subsequent missions. Science, technology, engineering, and math don’t reach into the human soul and strike the emotional chord that Art, specifically photography in this instance, does. The images that came back from Artemis II are deeply striking, and you don’t need to be an engineer or mathematician to appreciate or find them awe-inspiring. Humans traveled farther into space than ever before to make those pictures. I’m hard pressed to believe NASA would have half the funding it does if we only had telemetry data, graphs, and numbers from NASA missions for all of our seemingly brain-dead politicians to try to understand the importance of, rather than the stunning images they and us constituents can ooh and aww at. I often wonder if Artemis II was largely symbolic in this way. As many of the articles I read leading up to, during, and after the mission continue to speculate about “new discoveries”, of which it seems NASA did not anticipate many. It feels like this mission was to show the world that humanity still hungers to explore further than we’ve been before. As history shows, we always have.