NASA’s moon rocket sits on pad 39B before the Artemis 1 mission orbits the moon at the Kennedy Space Center, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2022, in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
access point
Almost 50 years have passed since the United States put the last man on the moon, a fact that now seems almost inconceivable.
Of course, NASA has put a car on Mars, which is much more challenging I think. So props for them. And the foolish and irrational Elon Musk put a real car in Earth’s orbit. That’s something a 12-year-old would do with a couple billion dollars, but I like it.
Finally, however, NASA is about to launch Artemis, another lunar mission. But to my surprise, I have heard very little discussion about it among friends and acquaintances. (Okay, a friend talks about that who is, like me, a space junkie Boomer.)
Most people my age knew exactly where they were the day men walked on the moon. My parents were tapping me on July 20, 1969, in front of a Magnavox television, an 8-year-old boy trying to stay awake to witness the most stupendous event in human history.
Growing up, we knew all these names at home: Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Jack King (the voice of Mission Control), Gus Grissom, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Frank McGee (NBC News, covering moon photos with a big orange Gulf logo on the desktop), Jules Bergman (ABC News science editor!), Roy Neal (NBC correspondent who covered decades of releases), and so on.
I can’t tell you the name of an astronaut currently employed by NASA, nor can I name any network space correspondents. None.
Quotes like “Zero-G and I feel fine”, “Give us a reading on alarm 1202”, or “What the hell is SCE to AUX?” they were commonly known astronaut quotes.
I have pondered this and have come to the conclusion that Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, Star Trek and other media space adventures make going to the moon seem, to the general public, like taking an Uber.
But is not.
As NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pointed out on “Meet the Press” last week before the Scrubbed Artemis Launch, “You can expect on a test flight that not everything will turn out as you expect. That’s part of a test flight.”
We have forgotten. But we shouldn’t have.
For example, Jan. On January 27, 1967, three Apollo astronauts died in a fire during a ground test. And in January On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded seconds after launch, killing seven astronauts. on Feb. On January 1, 2003, seven astronauts died during re-entry on the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Nelson, a former US senator from Florida, was a successful payload specialist on the Columbia, the last shuttle flight before the Challenger disaster. Very few people alive would have a better sense of that risk than he did.
Four astronauts will go to the moon, scheduled for a landing in 2025, including a woman and an African American. Artemis will be a more expansive lunar mission, given that our technology is so much more advanced than it was in the 1960s. For example, on the Apollo lunar lander, pilots entered combinations of nouns and verbs into a console that seemed less sophisticated. than a Texas Instruments calculator.
They had slide rules on board to do that sort of thing. Many of you probably don’t even know what a slide rule is.
This mission will contain fictional astronauts with sensors, and the command module will feature four seats, a rowing machine, and a flushing toilet.
This is not the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, an illusion of plywood and Christmas lights. This release is significant, and we should be more interested in it. I will be. It’s almost a childhood moment, and I also hope that children around the world will be inspired by this.
If you’re not inspired, call an Uber to take you to the new Star Wars movie. You know that everything will be fine.
But Artemis is real. And that’s so much cooler.
Senior Associate Editor Jack Ohman has been at The Bee since 2013. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, he has also won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Scripps Howard Award, the national SPJ Award, and the National Headliner Award. A Portland State graduate, Jack also writes editorials and columns.
