Moon Fever!

So, Artemis 2 is finally on its way. At the time of writing, Integrity, Artemis 2’s command module, is coasting towards down towards Earth from 70,000 kilometres out, heading towards a swing by and gravity assist maneuvre around our homeworld before conducting it’s TLI, or trans-lunar injection, burn to get itself on a free return trajectory around the moon and back to Earth. TLI. Earth Swing-by. Free return trajectory. These terms haven’t really seen any use since the heady days of the Apollo missions. Well, not outside of games like Kerbal Space Program anyway. 

I never thought I'd be able to watch a crewed lunar mission in my lifetime!

I guess moon fever has got me good. And I’m not mad about it at all. I’ve always been a space nerd first and foremost. Names like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and, later on, Alexei Lenovo and of course Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, Jack Swigert and Ken Mattingly, the heroes of Apollo 13, were second nature to me before I could properly spell, long before I developed any passing interest in whatever musician was supposed to be the big thing that particular week. Yet, it seemed to me like I would never see the likes of Project Apollo in my lifetime. NASA’s budget was a shadow of its former self, space exploration was something for nerds only, and despite the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the peaceful reunification of Germany, which I witnessed myself, humanity seemed hell bent on finding ever new and more gruesome ways of killing each other. Bosnia. Srebrenica. Chechnya. Rwanda. The list seemed endless. We were, to paraphrase one of my all time favourite movies, Interstellar, too busy worrying about our place in the dirt to wonder about our place in the stars.

Checking either the Artemis tracker...

... or DSN Now to see which part of the Deep Space Network is currently communicating with Artemis 2 has been part & parcel for me ever since the launch

And yet, here we are. In early April 2026, as the world seems more determined than ever to tear itself to shreds, Integrity, the Artemis 2 command module, is serenely moving through cislunar space. I can’t help but notice the parallel to another lunar fly-by mission that launched in similarly turbulent times. Back in December 1968, the world seemed to be on the edge of destruction. The Vietnam war was approaching its bloody climax. Civil strife was tearing apart much of the western world, from Berkeley to Berlin. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobbie Kennedy, aspiring leaders who carried the hopes of an entire generation, had been gunned down in cold blood. It seemed like hope was lost.

It was against this backdrop that Apollo 8 thundered off its launch pad at Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral on December 21st 1968. It was the first manned mission to the moon in history, and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were leaving behind a world in turmoil. Carried aloft by the mighty Saturn IV rocket that would, a little over half a year later, land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, over the next six days, the crew would provide a brief respite from the ceaseless stream of bad news that was inundating people even over the Christmas weekend. It was this mission that would give us Earthrise, the iconic image of our little blue home rising over magnificent desolation of the lunar surface. The Christmas broadcast from Apollo 8, with Borman, Lovell and Anders reciting passages from the Book of Genesis, provided a welcome tonic to a nation in turmoil.

Earthrise - captured by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders

Nearly half a century later, in 2020, I personally experienced a similar calming moment. Our homeworld was in the firm grip of the COVID pandemic, and whilst the summer of 2020 would in retrospect be considered as relatively benign here in Ireland, the strains were clearly visible all over the world. It was against this witches brew of science denial, chafing against lockdowns and general upheaval that the rarest of visitors called to Earth. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, named after the NASA mission that had spotted him in March of the same year, had passed its perihelion, the closest point to the sun on its orbit, on July 3rd and was climbing out of the sun’s gravity well towards its home in the Kuiper Belt, where it would arrive in another 3500 years before repeating its trip inward. I hadn’t expected much but the comet eventually became so bright that I was able to capture it from my balcony on July 16th, when it was bright enough to be picked up even with the naked eye. Serenely sailing past our little terraqueous globe in this turbulent summer of 2020, it served as as much needed reminder of the splendour that is all around us.

Comet C/2020 F3 Neowise as seen from my balcony in July 2020.

As I’m writing this in a café on the first full day of Artemis 2, regularly checking both the NASA website and DSN Now, I can’t help but wonder if it was always meant to be that this mission, humanity’s first foray to the moon in over half a century, would launch in such circumstances. A symbol of what humanity could be, proof, if it were needed that “…for all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.” I firmly believe that we shouldn’t have ceased manned space exploration after Apollo 17, that we should have continued on, developed the technology needed for larger missions to the moon, the establishment of a permanent surface base and, eventually, a full-blown colony. But hindsight is 20/20, as they say. And I for one will be glued to my devices for every day of this remarkable mission into deep space, a welcome reprieve from the utterly depressing drudgery of the world in 2026. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen are carrying the hopes of an entire generation with them on Artemis 2 and I can only hope that their mission will be as much of a success for our generation as Apollo 8 was for my parents. 

Godspeed, Artemis 2!