“And here we go. 10 – 9 – 8 – 7 … 4 – 3 – 2 – 1 – Booster ignition … and liftoff.
“The crew of Artemis II now bound for the moon. Humanity’s next great voyage begins.”
With that announcement, Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, N.C. State graduate Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen took off last Wednesday evening heading for the vicinity of the far side of the moon on a 10-day mission expected to break the distance record for traveling farther from Earth than any human ever has.
No matter how old you are nor how many you’ve seen, there are few things more mesmerizing than watching a 3,000-ton rocket ignite and lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The fiery blast from the bottom of the spacecraft to the plumes of smoke as it pushes off from the launch pad.
I hope you had an opportunity to watch the launch either live or on replay.
I can remember in grade school teachers would bring in a television set for students to watch launches of rockets from what was then named Cape Canaveral. We stopped class and watched every launch back in the mid-1960s.
I was in Mrs. Hatch’s kindergarten class inside our Little Red Schoolhouse in 1962 when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7. I don’t recall Mrs. Hatch having a TV so probably missed the launch live, not that I would have sat still long enough to actually watch.
However, my father bought a reel-to-reel movie about Glenn’s historic mission and would show it to classes for the next several years. He would bring his projector and screen to class and show the approximate 15-minute film to students.
Most kids were in awe of the space program in the 1960s and many wanted to be astronauts, along with the usual firefighters, police officers, cowboys and major league baseball players.
If you’re under 53 years old, you’ve never seen a manned space mission aimed to circle the moon as Artemis II is scheduled to do.
Unfortunately, if you’re under 53, you won’t get to watch an astronaut walk on the moon this time as those of us who are over 53 have.
In 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Jack Schmitt spent 75 hours on the lunar surface from December 11 until December 14, bringing an end to an Apollo program that won the space race against the Soviet Union.
The United States had six successful Apollo missions to the moon beginning in the summer of 1969 when Neil Armstrong hopped down the ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and proclaimed “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I was 12 years old and living in Madeira Beach, Florida at the time. My parents let me stay up to watch Armstrong descend that ladder and set foot on the moon at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 20. The signal was a bit grainy, as you might expect back then, but it was an amazing scene. Buzz Aldrin soon followed Armstrong onto the moon’s surface.
I can’t remember if that night we walked outside and looked up at the moon, thinking about a human walking around on the surface, but I know we did at some point during the mission.
Heck, nearly 57 years later, it’s still amazing that humans walked, hit a golf ball, rode around in a rover and planted an American flag on the surface of the moon and returned safely to Earth. It was a technological achievement once thought impossible, but was delivered upon the challenge by President John F. Kennedy..
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said in a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Seven years later, man landed on the moon.
John Glenn paved the way for those moon landings more than 50 years ago. The crew of Artemis II may be setting the stage for future manned flights to the moon and Mars.
A human walking on Mars seems outlandish. So did the concept of a human walking on the moon when I was a youngster.
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