My wife and I watched the launch of the Artemis II last night. The event brought back the wonder and inspiration I always feel when witnessing a new era of space travel. It has been far too long since humans last prepared to leave Earth’s orbit. As exciting and inspirational as the near-Earth orbit era has been it doesn’t compare to the site of humans preparing to explore beyond our globe to the larger space around us. It pains me that it took us 53 years to get back to this exploration. How much farther could we be if we had kept going in 1972. If we had gone back, if we had pushed ourselves to do both the near-Earth orbit work we did in the 80’s and 90s while still pursuing the ultimate dream, exploring the universe.

For those who say we are wasting money on this endeavor, I can’t support that position. Exploration is its own reward. The inspiration, the innovation and the feeling it generates are worth the relatively small amounts we spend on the space program. How many people will see this launch and be motivated to go into science and technology fields. Will they be the ones to unlock the breakthroughs of tomorrow? Will they be the future writers of inspiring fiction? Humans seem to be instinctive explorers, pushing out farther and we should not fight that instinct, we should embrace it and put more effort on that and less effort on destroying our world and killing our own species. Maybe space exploration is a key to giving people hope, something to inspire them to be better.

I know that I am inspired. I really want to figure out how to get Alan and Layla to the moonbase! Wow, that would be something, wouldn’t it?

Dream. Data. Discovery.

J E Sutton Jr