NASA's Newest Photos Of The Moon Will Make You Proud To Be An American
The United States still leads all nations in trips to the moon and/or its orbit.
NASA's Artemis II mission to fly past the moon has taken way more of my attention than I thought it would.
I mean, I knew it would. Space travel is always incredibly cool.
…Unless Katy Perry and one of Jeff Bezos' dong-shaped rockets are involved.
Then, not so much.
READ: THE FIRST BLACK ASTRONAUT CURRENTLY FLYING TO THE MOON SENDS MESSAGE TO THOSE MAKING IT ABOUT RACE
But after watching lift-off on TV and running outside my house in Central Florida to see if I could catch a glimpse of it (I couldn't; stupid clouds), I still found myself just thinking about the mission.
For the first time in my life, there were four people hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth. It was wild to think about.
Plus, for the first time, we were able to see a mission like this laid out in real-time online.
I watched the astronauts talk to mission control about which locker in their Orion capsule they were supposed to stuff their Ziploc bag of trash into.
And I say this without an ounce of irony: it was riveting.
Hell, I wrote like three articles about the trials and tribulations of the space toilet.
But the payoff came this week when the crew flew past the moon, going farther from Earth than any humans had ever gone before.
On the way by, they snapped some photos on iPhones that make the cameras the Apollo astronauts had back in the day look like those old wind-up disposable cameras.
And the results are nothing short of incredible.
I don't know how you can see this and not be fired up about being an American.
Sure, it's not just Americans involved, but NASA — an American agency — is the driving force, and we remain the only country on Earth that has sent people to the moon or its orbit.
That's just so cool.
So, congratulations to everyone involved as we get through the last couple of days of this mission, which will hopefully end with a safe, uneventful splashdown.
But, in the meantime, where can I get a print of one of those photos to hang in my office?