CDR Salamander - Fullbore Friday

I grew up with the Apollo Program and some of my earliest memories were watching astronauts during the lunar landings. You could see the Saturn V launches from my backyard.

Just as I was getting old enough to really enjoy it, it all stopped.

The 1970s.

The worst people for the worst reasons killed the space program as it became part of the national malaise of the 1970s, the core of which was defined by the period from the last person on the moon in 1972 through the fall of Saigon three years later, and bookended by the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.

For those who received the promise of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as to what the future in space would be never fulfilled, we tried to get excited by partial measures—Skylab; the Space Shuttle and its disasters; the downgrading of Reagan’s Space Station Freedom into the ‘Model UN in space,’ the International Space Station; and the lingering malaise and distraction that we endured during the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Here we are 53 years later, and at last we are reaching for the moon again. We never should have left.

What a great week to see Artemis II start the test run.

And so North America—three Americans and a Canadian—is heading to the moon.

Back at last.

The Commander Reid Wiseman, is a U.S. Navy Captain and former F-14 driver. The Pilot is another U.S. Navy Captain, Victor Glover, though he was a F/A-18 bubba.

Navy wins again!

Mission Specialist Christina Koch comes from a great ACC school, and for comic relief, we have our Canadian Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hansen, the only one who is on their first space flight.

Somewhere there are plenty of young men and women who, I hope, are watching as my generation did, the best of mankind again reaching out.

Let’s not let the momentum stop this time. Keep pushing out. It is what our species does best, and it brings the best out of us.

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