I'm All Aboard For Artemis II

I have a boarding pass. Not for me, however. It’s just for my name.

When I registered for this boarding pass on NASA's Artemis II website, my name joined six million other names already registered to be placed on an SD flash drive that the astronauts will carry on the “Integrity” Orion spaceship.

So, if only in name, I will be aboard the first human spacecraft to the moon since 1972.

I am 68 years old.

I remember my mother making me watch the John Glenn mission aboard Friendship 7 in 1962 on a large black-and-white television in our Connecticut rec room.

I remember Christmas Eve of 1968 when the astronauts of the Apollo 8 first-ever human moon flyby read the first few lines of Genesis to the “good people” on Earth while millions watched on TV.

I remember joining my campers at Camp Paradox in the Adirondack Mountains of New York watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin accomplish the Apollo 11 first-ever human moon landing in 1969 while Michael Collins orbited overhead becoming the loneliest human being ever. We watched gathered around another black-and-white TV with rabbit-ear antennas tuned into a station from Burlington, Vermont.

This is pretty amazing for me, to have lived long enough to see humans reach again for the Moon.

Even more amazing, Dr. Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin is still alive to witness the Artemis II mission. He is 96 years old. Moreover, Aldrin’s father was an early aeronautics professor who knew the Wright Brothers and then watched his son land on the Moon.

If you want some inspiration, watch on YouTube as the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to reach the Moon, showed grainy black-and-white TV pictures taken from a capsule window of the lunar surface. Meanwhile, on a scratchy radio connection, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders read the first few passages from Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

We should hope to be similarly inspired by the astronauts of “Integrity” at the Moon.