I’m grateful that Artemis II has gone pretty smoothly so far. Not perfectly, of course; there were some problems with the toilet and Microsoft Outlook, and I’ll refrain from making the jokes that are already running through Outlook users’ minds.

The public communications– the announcements, the dialogues, the speeches– have generally been beautifully scripted. I don’t mean scripted in the paranoid and conspiratorial sense that some flat Earther might, I mean in the sense of conveying thoughtful sentiments and callbacks to past missions.

The line that has struck me most so far came just after the Orion capsule Integrity broke Apollo 13’s old record for greatest distance from Earth. The Canadian mission specialist Hansen spoke for the crew:

From the cabin of Integrity here, as we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration. We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear. But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.

“Make sure this record is not long-lived.” I heard that and flashed back to a certain few lines from President Reagan’s Challenger speech, which of course were in a completely different context:

We’ve grown used to wonders in this [the 20th] century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for 25 years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun.

May the new wonders come soon enough and often enough that we grow used to seeing these records broken, and may we keep appreciating them.

I pray that the Integrity crew and capsule come home safely.

I hope that Artemis III and IV go to plan, which will mean humans walking on the Moon in 2028.

And of course, I hope the whole thing speeds up enough that when the time comes for me to slip the surly bonds of this Earth– later this century or early in the next– it’ll be because I’m blasting off towards retirement on Mars. Luxury suite, caveside resort, daily bridge.

…

I was going to title this “A great gig in the sky,” but then I heard the President’s phone call to the capsule and changed it up.