By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
Back in my single days, I spent a fair amount of time on now-defunct college football message boards. Over time, I came to be friends on social media with some of the regulars, despite only ever meeting a couple of them in person.
Those friendships have outlasted the message boards and most of the free time that I spent watching and talking about college football. I bring them up because that corner of my social media circle has been buzzing the past week about NASA’s Artemis II mission, currently flying around the moon.
People had mostly been quiet about the mission until early last week, when it looked like the planned launch window was going to work out. I knew folks would be excited for the launch, and they were, posting along with it with all of the excitement and none of the cynicism of a College Football Playoff game. I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Artemis to that point, but the excitement was contagious.
It didn’t stop after the launch, either. People have been posting clips and links to streams and articles about the ongoing mission. Most of it has been excitement and wonder, but reports that the mission crew was having issues with Microsoft Outlook earned laughs and sympathy.
Most of the people I’m seeing this from are fellow millennials. We’ve seen some really cool things from space exploration, especially images from the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, Mars rovers, and the existence of the International Space Station as a continuously manned mission for more than a quarter century.
But manned moon missions eluded us. Even the Gen X crew of Artemis II entirely missed the Apollo program. Mission commander Reid Wiseman was born almost three years after Apollo 17.
There has been chatter about missions to Mars for as long as I can remember, but it has always been far in the future, for good reason. It would take an almost unfathomable commitment, literal years of spaceflight. I don’t expect to see a manned mission to Mars until I’m an old man, if ever.
Humanity has been to the moon before, but the moon still encourages and inspires dreaming. Even a narrow crescent moon dominates the night sky when it’s visible.
Several years ago, I had the honor of interviewing Michael Collins about the Gemini 10 mission he flew for NASA in 1966, genuinely one of the biggest highlights of my newspaper career. Collins also was the third astronaut on Apollo 11, remaining in orbit above the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Like the Artemis II crew, Collins flew to and around the moon without landing.
The Artemis program will have a hard time being quite as inspiring as the Apollo program, but I certainly expect the Artemis II crew will have plenty of eager audiences to tell there stories to for decades to come.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.