This month's nine-day space flight around the moon could not have come at a better time for a fractured world. It did something badly needed — it offered hope for something better than missiles, bombs, destruction and death.
And while cynics like me usually don't support the sort of happy-clappy conversations that came from the Artemis II crew, their talk of love and peace was a welcome relief from the vulgar, derisive warmongering going on here on Earth.
Artemis II reminded us that we all live together on a fragile planet affected by everything we do. While I held out little or no hope for “peace for our time,” for all of those nine days many of us sat in awe, listening to articulate people speak the truth. We hope it was to power, reminding us of the reality we share.
But the history so many ignore, the history that turned Neville Chamberlain's 1938 “promise” of peace if Hitler was “allowed” to annex part of what was then Czechoslovakia, turned out to be risible. The British prime minister is now remembered for the failure to appease a murderous tyrant.
Living in perilous times, the encouraging words from space may not matter much to today's wannabe tyrants, but it's something for the rest of us with no control over the consequences and no power to which to cling.
For those of us of a certain age who are acknowledged science fiction nerds, memory intrudes — we remember the beginning of the space race, the exhilaration when Neil Armstrong stepped from the Apollo 11 capsule onto the moon's surface and the long years between that day — July 20, 1969 — and this year's “shared” slingshot around the moon. It was shared because everyone in the world with access to electronics could follow the Artemis mission.
How much different this was compared to the stunning launch of Sputnik by Russia on Oct. 4, 1957. I was 12 years old, four days before becoming a teenager, and glued to my parents' black-and-white, rabbit-eared television. I could not have been more thrilled.
It was happening. Humans were exploring space — the science fiction writers were not just concocting the future out of whole cloth, they were going to be proven right.
Twelve years later, two men — Buzz Aldrin followed Armstrong onto the moon's surface — stepped onto a different world.
And then, we seemed to have lost interest in the far reaches of space. We were content to stay close to home, launching satellites and the space station and being satisfied with that.
Then, the Challenger disaster happened on Jan. 28, 1986. Such memories don't fade with time. I will always recall sitting down to breakfast on a sunny Hawaiian morning, when my husband returned from our hotel room grim and pale-faced. Soon, the entire restaurant fell silent as the news passed from table to table. It was as if all the air had been sucked from the room.
