Liftoff to the Moon: Human Hope & Courage

Houston, we have liftoff.  My heart swells when I hear that phrase.  Today, I think of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, the NASA astronauts and Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian Space Agency astronaut who are, as I write this, heading back to Earth on their spacecraft, Integrity, after being the first humans to see the far side of the moon. They are also the first humans to go the furthest away from the Earth, 252,760 miles.  Imagine being that far from home!  What does that feel like?  How courageous and optimistic do you have to be to venture that far?  I am amaze and proud that we still live in the Age of Exploration.  I was beginning to doubt if humans had that creative bravery anymore, and I’m please tonight to see that we do.

This also makes me think back fifty-seven years to Apollo 11, which landed the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong and his historic walk on July 20, 1969.  Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent two hours exploring the surface of the moon.  They returned to Earth four days later.  I know exactly where I was.  I was thirteen years old, and I was in Florence, Italy on vacation with my parents and older sister.  Everywhere we went, Italians were congratulating us because we were Americans.  I  felt like I was right there with Neil and Buzz, and their command module pilot, Michael Collins.  I could not have been more proud or excited. I was sure that by the time I was thirty, there would be moon colonies and maybe a flight to Mars.  I’ve waited fifty-seven years to return to the moon, that glorious orb that I look for every night ,and I am still surprised by when I see its face in the morning sky.

I will turn seventy this week, and I am quite nostalgic about the moon, about my time on this planet, and the sheer brilliance of this mission and our place in this vast universe. I was so inspired by this new mission, that I signed up to have my name be included on an SD card that is flying inside the Integrity right now.  In this way, I have gotten myself to the moon.  I can soar in my imagination to places I will never actually be able to go to in my lifetime. 

While I was watching the Integrity crew interview today, I was in awe of how well they worked together as a team, how much humor they displayed while doing serious work, and how much they all wanted us Earthlings to understand what a beautiful and precious planet we live on.  I was in tears when Jeremy Hansen announced that they  wanted to name an unnamed crater after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Caroll, who died of cancer in 2020.  She was a pediatric nurse practitioner and left behind her husband and her two daughters, Katie and Ellie, now twenty and seventeen. The crater is on the edge of the near side of the moon so that means it will never be lost and all of Earth will be able to see this bright spot.  As I often do, I wrote a poem to mark the occasion, so I can remember how I felt during this historic time.