Artemis 2 grants humanity the chance to marvel in ways we do too infrequently for our own good as a species.
Our ability to travel beyond the biosphere that is the single source of our health and wealth should be recognized as the miracle that it is.
My Grandmommy Ruth, the youngest of my grandparents, was born two weeks before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. In her lifetime she saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon and the Space Shuttle fly and fly again and again. She witnessed the first humans to travel around the moon on Apollo 8 in 1968 (58 years ago) — which was only seven years after the first human traveled to space. Only four years later, the last humans travelled to the moon in 1972. In one lifetime, we went from being grounded on earth to leaping onto the lunar surface.
Apollo was a magnificent achievement in early exploration. Five decades may seem like a lot given current media cycles but it is a blink in human history. Apollo gave us our first perspective from outside the biosphere. Humanity first looked back and experienced the fundamental reality that all of human history bloomed on a blue glowing ball hanging within the lethal vacuum of space. We are still, too slowly, coming to terms with this reality.
The Artemis 2 mission is an extraordinary return to an extraterrestrial universe hostile to our existence. Human health is not a universal “thing.” It is a bespoke solution to the particular environmental conditions of Earth that make our existence possible. As we leave the safety of our home planet, we still have a tremendous amount to learn about how to maintain health away from earth. Operationally, Artemis is testing hardware, life support systems and procedures, and working on important science and human health research. It promises a mission of historic firsts in its crew.
But more importantly, it is a critical next step towards the goal of establishing long-term human habitations on the lunar surface. And that a step to be followed by others. Living creatures don’t limit their range. Fungi thrive on the Antarctic ice. Arctic terns travel the globe. Humans travel beyond it.
From a historic standpoint, the Apollo missions were as Magellan exploring the unknown portions of our globe — helping to establish the biologic and scientific realities of our existence through human exploration.
The Artemis missions will be seen more in line with the early Jamestown settlement, as a new branch in history as we permanently expand the reach and interconnectedness of all living beings in ways that we in the present can hardly imagine and that the future will look back and imagine was inevitable.
“No man is an island” we learned in English class— nor is any crewed mission into space. Whatever our nationality, our hearts and dreams travel with the Artemis 2 crew and their very human mission.