I was nineteen years old and I had been waiting for weeks.
The Apollo 11 mission had been building in my awareness the way important things used to build — through newspapers read front to back, through Walter Cronkite’s voice, through conversations that carried genuine weight. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969, I was watching, and so was nearly everyone I knew. For that night, something remarkable happened to a country that was otherwise tearing itself apart.
We were deep in Vietnam. The protests were real and they were right, and the divisions ran bone-deep. I would be jailed for resistance in the years that followed. We did not trust our leaders easily, and in many cases we were correct not to. But NASA was something else. NASA was engineers, test pilots, mathematicians — and an idea, held with genuine faith, that the country could aim at something difficult and beautiful and get there. On that July night, for a few hours at least, we were not a divided people. We were watchers. We were a species doing something it had never done before. Whatever else was true about America in 1969, that night it felt like it could still be counted among the things that were true.
I was reminded of all this yesterday — or perhaps a day or two before — when I learned, almost incidentally, that we were going back.
Not buried, exactly — you could find it if you looked — but not above the fold either.
Today, April 1, 2026, the Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are climbing into their Orion spacecraft, named, with some care, Integrity, atop a 322-foot rocket at Pad 39B, the same complex that sent Apollo crews to the Moon more than fifty years ago. This will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Victor Glover will become the first Black astronaut to visit the lunar environment. Christina Koch will be the first woman. Jeremy Hansen will be the first non-American. They will not land — this is a flyby, a test of the Orion capsule — but their path could send them farther from Earth than any human has ever ventured, surpassing the Apollo 13 distance record.
This is not a small thing. And yet I nearly missed it.
I am approaching 76. I was 19 when Armstrong stepped off the ladder. The intervening years have taught me something about the difference between a country that can hold a shared moment of attention and one that cannot. We are, at present, a country that cannot — or more precisely, a country whose attention has been systematically captured and redirected. The news is occupied with another war, this one apparently optional, timed with the kind of cynicism that used to at least try to hide itself. We are watching, daily, the celebration of thuggery, the erosion of due process, the weaponization of chaos as a governing strategy. The pull on attention is relentless and it is not toward the sky.
In 1969, even amid genuine crisis, there was a residual faith — in certain institutions, in expertise, in the possibility of collective aspiration. NASA was the carrier of that faith for many of us who had lost it almost everywhere else. The people pointing the rocket at the Moon were not politicians. They were people who had done the math.
Some things are the same now. There are still people who have done the math. Reid Wiseman, a single father of two daughters whose wife died in 2020, said of his crew: “There are four humans that were put in a position to be able to go explore and do something that is very unique and rare in this civilization.” Victor Glover is bringing a Bible and his wedding rings and heirlooms for his four daughters. Christina Koch, who holds the record for the longest continuous stay in space by a woman, is carrying a letter from her family. Jeremy Hansen has a moon pendant engraved with his family’s birthstones and the words moon and back.
These are not abstractions. These are people.
I did not follow this mission for weeks the way I followed Apollo 11. The information was there. But the attentional landscape is so fractured, so colonized by manufactured emergency, that something this consequential can approach its launch day without the cultural drumbeat it deserves. That is not NASA’s failure. That is ours — or rather, it is the failure of whatever it is we have allowed to happen to our collective attention.
But today I am looking up.
Godspeed, Reid. Godspeed, Victor. Godspeed, Christina. And welcome, Jeremy, to the journey.
The Moon is still there. Some of us still know how to find it.