The Challenge the Artemis II Crew Gave the Rest of Us
As a reporter covering NASA during the early 1980s, I quickly grew accustomed to close encounters with real-life space legends. All part of the job. But a chance sighting at the Kennedy Space Center one evening reminded me of the magic of leaving Earth.
I had just finished anchoring a broadcast of the space shuttle’s first nighttime launch along with Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to leave his footprints on the moon. Gene regularly joined me to add his expertise and eloquence to our coverage. As we left the booth, he stopped, pointed skyward, and said, “Lynn, you see that spot there, the left eye of the man in the moon?” I looked up and nodded. Gene continued: “That’s where I landed.”
Whoa. That face was a real place. The man next to me had stood there. I couldn’t stop staring.
Last week, the goosebumps returned. At a moment that perfectly dovetailed with many Americans’ yearning for a personal mental-health day (just one?), Artemis II, the first moon-bound mission with humans since 1972, delivered an unusually emotional escape. The magic, this time, wasn’t just the smooth launch and the “perfect, bullseye splashdown,” as NASA’s Rob Navias commented, but the palpable awe radiating from four extraordinary Earthlings as they showed the rest of us what we were missing.
“You’d fall in straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those,” the pilot Victor Glover reported about the vast field of craters, never seen before, that pockmark the other side of the moon. He described islands of light, valleys that looked like black holes. Our moon not only has a face; it has a spine.
Commander Reid Wiseman delivered a play-by-play of active meteoroid strikes on the lunar surface: “I saw two, and Jeremy [Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist,] has seen one,” Wiseman began; the science adviser Kelsey Young literally jumped out of her chair back at mission control. “Oh, Jeremy saw two.” These are valuable scientific observations—crucial information for future settlements on a celestial body with no atmosphere. But I couldn’t stop grinning either as Young smacked her forehead in delight.
The solar eclipse also provided invaluable data, thanks to the astronauts’ giant, magnified view as the moon blocked the sun. They reported subtle color nuances, photometry, and other details that might explain the evolution of the lunar surface. Understanding its origins could help us learn where we came from too, and, more important, where we are going. Or at least provide some answers to all those times we lay on the grass as kids and stared up into the night sky, wondering.
Wonder. It’s a hard experience to translate. And Commander Wiseman wasn’t shy about admitting that everything they’d seen had worn out his supply of adjectives. “Houston,” he radioed down, “if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow, that will help my vocabulary out a bit.”
I’d never heard astronauts so candid, so uninhibited. Their excitement was profound, their enthusiasm contagious. When I emailed Marsha Ivins, a retired astronaut pal, to ask about her reaction to the mission, she admitted that when Integrity left the relative safety of Earth orbit—essentially flying without a net for anything requiring urgent attention—she had “one of those wonder/horror/amazement/buzzy/pride/respect-for-the-physics moments.” In other words: Ain’t science grand.
And what Artemis saw from Integrity (talk about a perfectly timed choice of name) is quickly rewriting the science books. It’s been a minute since we as a nation had a moment like this, in which our scientific prowess shone bright—a minute since we showed proper reverence for all those equations and computations and codes, the “little ones and zeroes,” as Cernan, an engineer, used to tell me. The facts that matter, that make you feel: Wow!
Ivins also reminded me, though, that Wow! works only when it’s put in motion by human beings. Don’t forget, she said, “the years of dedicated work the entire team has spent getting to these magical 10 days.”
Early on, the mission specialist Christina Koch was asked about living and working in a capsule about the size of a very large hot tub covered over with a seven-foot ceiling. It was so tight, Koch confessed, smiling, that even in the more spacious setting of microgravity, every movement was “a four-person activity.” This was not a complaint. They actually liked their group hugs. When Koch returned to Houston, she was asked to define the word crew. She didn’t hesitate: “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute, for the same purpose.” Then, in what I’d call a hopeful, if not generous, plea for global cooperation, she extended the metaphor to the rest of us. When she looked out the spacecraft’s windows and saw the home planet, she said, “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly, in the universe … Planet Earth, you are a crew.”
If only.
People used to ask me why I liked covering the space program, and I never had to think twice: My other beat was politics, and it was more than satisfying to deal with individuals for whom spin described how a satellite moved when launched, not how to cover up a story. NASA is, of course, a public agency, and no journalist should ever give it a pass—should ever exonerate the deadly decisions and misguided management, for example, that led to the loss of 14 human beings in the hideous accidents that destroyed first Challenger, then Columbia. But today’s journalists seem, at least, to have a relationship with NASA management that’s strikingly different from that of their peers in other government agencies. With no media access of my own, I watched much of the activity on NASA’s TV feed, where the back-and-forth at press conferences was consistently cordial and sane. The questions ranged from tough to just informative, but no one on the podium belittled any reporter with a scornful slur. And almost every journalist bookended the question with a gracious “Thank you.”
I don’t know if this civility means that NASA is operating on its own planet, but I do find it appealing. And perhaps this concern—among the astronauts, between the crew and mission control, between the agency and the press—is how this very human mission accomplished so much. How four people traveled farther from their home planet than anyone, ever, and came back safely.
Maybe everyone was simply caught up in the seductive power of what the capcom Jacki Mahaffey teasingly called “moon joy.” The crew was smitten. They cooed openly about what they saw, about their families, about one another. Ground control was captivated. Management agreed.
“If you can’t take love to the stars, what are we doing?” Amit Kshatriya, the NASA associate administrator, asked at a press conference. “Like, why are we even going? That’s why we send humans instead of robots sometimes.”
That was, I repeat, a NASA official, speaking publicly. Love. Bring it on. Can the glow from this 10-day burst of joy possibly be sustained?
Maybe that’s not the right question. This mission humanized the moon. Now we should ask, can that glow ever reflect back on Earth?