GoKawiilTravel to space has become commonplace. Over the last three decades, nearly 300 people have flown to and from the International Space Station, some of them residing there for months at a time. In the last several years, the rocket startup Blue Origin has launched a series of day trips just over the threshold into space -- high-end carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King and William Shatner.
The imminent Artemis II lunar mission is different.
NASA's spaceflight, scheduled to lift off Wednesday evening, will carry four astronauts on a round-trip all the way to the moon, a thousand times farther away than the space station, and they'll have to break free from Earth's gravity to do so. It's a trip that only two dozen humans have ever taken, and the last time it happened was in 1972.
Artemis II's Orion spacecraft will also take its four astronauts farther than any humans have ever traveled into space, on a long arc reaching 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon. By contrast, the Apollo astronauts 50-plus years ago were snuggled into a lunar orbit just 70 or so miles from the surface.
This will be a massive achievement for NASA in its own right. It is also a harbinger of a new and disruptive era in the still-unfolding Space Age.
Yet it hardly seems to be making a dent in the national conversation.
For sure, there's a lot going on here on Earth that's on the front of many people's minds. Military conflict. Government gridlock. Political protests. Anxiety about the cost of living and adequate health care. But that was true back in the '60s and early '70s as well, and perhaps never more so than in the years right around the first moon landing in July 1969, Apollo 11's one giant leap for mankind.
I was a kid when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put their bootprints into the dusty lunar terrain, and I vividly remember the nonstop TV coverage. I eagerly tuned in to see the splashdowns as the astronauts from all the Apollo spaceflights returned to Earth. It was a gripping, heroic narrative.
Those Apollo moon missions were the culmination of the first wave of space exploration, a decade and a half filled with remarkable feats, one after another.
The Artemis missions mark the start of a whole new era of space exploitation.
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