GoKawiilIf you have spent the last week inexplicably emotional about a space mission, you are not alone and you are not being dramatic. Something real is happening to you. Something your nervous system recognized before your brain caught up to it, and it is worth understanding why, because the reason is actually about a lot more than space.
Here’s what happened. Four humans got into a rocket and went to the moon, farther from Earth than any humans have ever traveled in the history of our species. And they were so good at it, so genuinely moved by it, and so articulate about what they were seeing and feeling, that millions of people who have been running on anxiety and dread for the last eleven years just stopped for a moment and finally exhaled.
Did you feel it too? That specific relief that’s hard to name. I found myself trying to understand it. The closest I can get is this: the feeling of watching something go right and realizing, somewhere deep in your body, that you had forgotten things could go right. Because when something actually goes right, when the people in charge do their jobs well, speak in full sentences, make decisions that protect people instead of endangering them, the reaction can feel strangely emotional. What you’re feeling isn’t just relief, it’s grief. Grief for every year you spent bracing. Grief for how normal the bracing became. Grief for how completely you forgot that competence was once ordinary.
That is not a small thing. That is your nervous system coming up for air. I want you to enjoy it. And when they land, and they will land, and the news cycle will move on immediately as it always does, I want you to remember that you felt this.
The crew did not make this easy to resist. Reid Wiseman, the commander, is a widower raising two daughters alone after his wife Carroll died of cancer in 2020 at 46. She was a NICU nurse who spent her life saving other people’s babies, and when he wanted to move them back to Virginia when she got sick, she told him no. She said: this is your job and you love it and we are staying and you are going to do this. He followed those marching orders all the way to the moon, and after they broke the record for the farthest distance any humans have ever traveled from Earth, his crewmate Jeremy Hansen (a Canadian!!) floated over and proposed naming a crater after her. A bright spot on the moon. Carroll Crater. His daughters watched from the visitor gallery at Johnson Space Center. Nobody had a dry eye in zero gravity, including, maybe you.
And it gets even better. Christina Koch became the first woman to travel to the vicinity of the moon. The last time humans went to the moon, women could not have their own credit card. And then there is what Victor Glover. He is the first Black man in history to travel beyond low Earth orbit. And when asked about it, he said something that is worth sitting with: it is the story of humanity, not Black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history. He is not minimizing what he did, he’s expanding it. He’s saying that when we finally get it right, when we finally send the people who were always capable and always deserving, it does not belong only to them. It belongs to all of us. That is what inclusion actually feels like when it is real.
If any of this made you cry, good. Let yourself feel all of it.
As I spent my third morning in a row of just starring at pictures of the moon, I decided to try and find out why this felt so good and why I felt so moved. It turns out what we are feeling has a name. Researchers have spent years studying awe, that specific feeling of encountering something so vast that your usual mental categories cannot contain it. What they found is that awe shrinks fear. Temporarily, measurably, beautifully. We have talked about this feeling a lot here at Airplane Mode. When you experience genuine awe, you stop being focussed on yourself, and you feel part of something larger, and psychologists call this the small self effect. Feeling small is relief. Especially if you have been carrying a lot. Especially if feeling the weight of responsibilities has felt very heavy lately.
There is also what astronauts call the overview effect, the perspective shift that comes from seeing earth as it actually is: a small, luminous, improbable oasis in an enormous darkness. Victor Glover looked at it from 252,000 miles away and said: trust us. You look amazing. You look beautiful. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research tells us that emotions like awe and wonder do not just feel good in the moment. They literally broaden our thinking and build long-term psychological resilience. People who regularly experience awe are more creative, more connected, and less susceptible to the feeling that everything is about to fall apart. Awe is a biological reset button, and four humans went to the moon and pushed it for all of us, and your body knew what to do with that before you maybe had words for it.
And then there is the competence. This is the part that I think is hardest to admit but most important to say out loud. We have gotten so used to watching the people who are supposed to be in charge fail loudly, fail publicly, fail in ways that feel designed to make us feel small and powerless, that watching four people simply be extraordinary at an extraordinarily hard thing produced in many of us something close to shock. We did not know we were this hungry for it. We did not know how much we had been bracing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t realize how clenched I was. Nobody told me that watching competent people do a hard thing correctly would be the most therapeutic experience of my adult life.
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