In Janurary of fifth grade I sat on the rough brown-orange carpet with all the other 5th and 6th graders of Lincoln Elementary School's library floor...
Watching and waiting with Excitement...10,9,8,7...
I was instantly drawn to space in those moments, and the weeks before as my teachers had excitedly explained what was going to happen up there, in space...
6, 5, 4...The excitement was contagious...teachers, peers, and I, anxiously watching. What would it be like out there in space?...
3, 2, 1...Liftoff...
The hopes and dreams of an American people. This was an exciting mission because it was sending a down to earth non-astronaut into space for the first time. A teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who was going to do some science experiments in orbit while schoolchildren, like me, would be watching. Space became real, and possible.
Hope was rising up inside us all as those rockets propelled the Challenger Space Shuttle higher and higher...
...and then...disaster...
73 seconds... then silence.
The TV was quietly turned off and we were told to go back to class without much explanation.
That event is so vivid in my mind. And space always was something spectacular to me. In fact, I love to star gaze. I also am fascinated by the moon. I often wondered what it was like to see the moon landing on TV years ago. I love looking at the surface of our lunar neighbor through telescope lenses. And when Challenger exploded, I lost something.
But last week, the whole week, I was like that little girl sitting on the carpet again. This now teacher, is so glad it was spring break and that NASA now has a YouTube channel with live feeds. I was figuratively in space much of this last week through that video stream coming from thousands upon thousands of miles away. We were going back to the moon. The fifty year wait was over. We weren't just going into earth orbit, we were going to deep space.(Not that going to earth orbit isn't amazing or spectacular, because I still find that pretty dang cool.)
Not only were we doing this fantastic thing, but we were doing it with the first African-American Pilot and the first women Mission Specialist. This was history happening right before our eyes...and it was something good instead of the often depressing historic and newsworthy events of today.
Lift off was perfect and I was on the edge of my seat watching with my kids while enjoying our weekly sushi tradition at a local grocery store. I remember looking at a different table and a young boy and his dad were also watching. This was incredible!
And the images sent back from Artemis, also incredible:
This wouldn't have been as special of an event if it was an unmanned spacecraft like happened during The Artemis I Mission in 2022. It was a pivotal mission in preparation for Artemis II and it's four person crew, yet it wasn't as impactful or as newsworthy. See, the human element is still important and inspirational.
In her speech at the welcome home event, Astronaut Christina Koch spoke of the importance of a human crew and what it meant to be a crew: "A crew. If people are, you know, a group that is in it all the time, no matter what. That is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other. That gives grace. That holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. So, when we saw Tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe... So, I may have not learned, I know I haven't learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there's one new thing I know. And that is Planet Earth, you are a crew."
It truly is amazing when we work together, like the team at NASA from astronauts to engineers, to mission control, the whole team, we can make miraculous things happen. This mission gives me hope in humanity and that we can do the unthinkable.
Thank you to this Artemis Crew, and all of NASA, for giving Crew Planet Earth new hope and especially for giving us 10 days of "Moon Joy."
Artemis II Crew: Jeremy Hansen(Canada), Christian Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman.
All photos can be found on NASA's website in their image and video library HERE.
