NASA's Artemis II Mission is 'Hopecore,' and I Can't Stop Crying
- Marielle Bokor
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
I’ve got a weird relationship to the moon. I’m not quite Gen-X, not quite full Millenial, so I’ve got a weird relationship with everything, really, but the micro generation known as X-ennials, which is me, has a very unique perspective on things, because of our fluency in an analog then digital world. We get the best of both worlds. I can work a card catalog and I can touch a computer like it’s not about to explode and murder me. I can even make a Tiktok. The kids are alright.
But we also got a LOT of trauma. While the moon missions were just before our time, they were JUST before our time. I was only 4 years old when the Challenger disaster happened. I was 20 when the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, and visited the memorial on a trip to visit my aunt in D.C. a summer later. Most of the time, when someone rolled a TV up for live news, it was not good - from bombing in Iraq to Afghanistan to 9/11 and things like Katrina.
Did we dream about being astronauts and going to space? Absolutely. But if we’re being honest, people had been to the moon, and since that time, bad things kept happening. As time wore on, NASA took more and more of a back seat to everything else. Maybe we dreamed of the moon once, but now a fear surrounded it, at the same time that at least as a national priority, space exploration was being relegated to the halls of planetarium’s we’d visited as kids, that we thought were relics.
But they’re not. Even with proposed budget cuts currently threatening 41 missions at NASA, even with…well, everything looking like someone’s gonna roll another TV in the room and tell us we need to watch…right now we watch for the wonder of it all.
When you need a win, how about one for all humanity. We got Project Hail: Mary but even that box office beauty doesn’t compare to seeing the successful launch, reading that this will be the first woman to Lunar Vicinity or seeing astronauts' ecstatic iPhone photos of Earth from somewhere way way up above it, and getting to see the face of that pale blue dot in mind-blowing HD? I am seriously already crying at the absolute magnitude of such a feat.
But then you find out that:
The Artemis II carried heritage hardware from previous space shuttle journeys and moon missions so that those that never made it to the moon or home could be there with them.
They named a bright spot on the never before seen area of the dark side of the moon after the Commander Reid Wiseman’s wife, Carroll, “Two R’s, Two L’s” as they said during the broadcast where the dedication was announced, who passed away a year ago.
The person who requested the naming of the crater/bright spot wasn’t her husband. It was actually Canadian Space agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, as we found out during the live broadcast where they broke it to him.
There’s a live broadcast of Artemis II you can watch from Nasa’s website, Youtube, Hulu - just about everywhere. You can literally hear them talk science, tell Earth Command “you look gorgeous” or chase around jars of Nutella.
The crew woke up to a previously recorded message from James Lovell, (click above for audio) who among other things, (Many impressive other things) was the pilot of Apollo 8. Yes, that Apollo 8. The message welcomed the Artemis crew to “his old neighborhood” and passed the torch to them
Now, the weird hot tears rolling down your face after just a few of these points? These aren’t the jaw-dropped heart pounding sort of shock feelings you’re used to. The reason they come so quick and run so fast is they’re excited tears. Happy tears. It’s ok to look up at the sky and hope. We need this.
