I almost missed the first moon landing.

It was 1969, and I was a 20-year-old college student more interested in being with my girlfriend than watching TV news. So on the fateful day that Neil Armstrong described his interplanetary touchdown as “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” well, I was on a shopping spree in Santa Monica, California, with my favorite honey.

“Hey,” I remember inquiring, “why are all those people crowded around that store window?” Behind it, of course, sat a blaring television set. And that’s how I ended up watching the world’s first lunar landing amid a crowd of gawking strangers.

I don’t remember being particularly awed or impressed by what I saw. Boy, what a difference 57 years can make!

This month’s 10-day Artemas II voyage didn’t even involve walking on the moon. What it did involve, however, was four crew members—including a woman, black man, and Canadian—plunging 252,756 miles into space, farther from earth than anyone had ever gone. Making them the first humans to view and manually photograph the moon’s entire darkened rear end.

All of which left me chilled, thrilled, and, yes, somehow strangely filled.

“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” Christina Koch, the crew’s only woman, said following the craft’s April 10th splashdown. “It lasted just a second or two…but something just threw me suddenly into the lunar landscape and it became real.”

For me, the voyage’s most awesome aspect was the crew’s recounting of the 40 minutes they spent circling the moon’s far side, out of the earth’s sight and completely beyond its reach, as literally the most isolated humans in history. An experience which, pilot Victor Glover later declared, felt “too big to just be in one body.”

Had I been there, I imagine, I’d have felt frightened. And yet, also somehow reassured at the vastness and emptiness of space compared to the utter compactness and finite efficiency of my own microscopic human body. How miraculous and wonderful, I’d have thought, to be alive, sentient, and in existence. And what a potentially unifying message for earthlings of all stripes, creeds, and colors whose world, at the moment, seems so hostile, troubled, and resistant.

The astronauts themselves appeared to recognize the magnitude of their momentous journey. “You guys are talking to us,” Glover said at one point, “because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place in the universe” and “in the cosmos.”

He paused thoughtfully before continuing.

“In all of this emptiness,” the pilot went on, “this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place where we get to exist together. As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on earth—and that’s love. We’re still able to feel your love from Earth. And to all of you down there on Earth…we love you from the moon.”

Later, finally emerging from their long silence on the other side, Koch echoed the very same sentiment. “It’s so great to hear from Earth again,” she said in the crew’s first post-darkness transmission. “To Asia, Africa, and Oceania, we are looking back at you” and “you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too.”

Then she delivered the immortal punchline.

“We will explore,” she said, and “we will build. We will build ships; we will visit again. We will construct science outposts, we will drive rovers, we will do radio astronomy, we will found companies, we will bolster industry, we will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

And that, I don’t mind telling you, was when I cried.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)