At 1:56 p.m. today, according to news reports, the four astronauts on Artemis II will have traveled farther away from Earth than any human beings have ever traveled in global history.
Imagine that.
It is not the biggest story in worldwide media. Not even close. Bombs and missiles are exploding in Iran and throughout the Middle East. The world is preoccupied with that war, with the suffering right now and what it could become, because war is the oldest and most dominating story of human despair that there is, always bringing with it the highest cost in loss and pain.
Even if much of the coverage involves gas prices and the markets.
This flight around the moon becomes a global afterthought. It is pushed to the other end of newscasts and news sites, though the courage of the four people on board is almost unimaginable — stop to really think what they face, what they risk, how they will soon spend more than 40 minutes traveling above the far side of the moon with absolutely no radio contact with Earth — and it has not become a global point of shared communion, even if the Easter message of astronaut Victor Glover, his reflections on the Earth and humanity, is something we all could use to hear…
And even if this celestial moment is the result of centuries of study and contemplation by some of the greatest thinkers and dreamers to ever walk the planet, all their longshot visions rising up to become manifest in the staggering achievement and diligence of the NASA scientists and engineers who designed this flight and mapped out the have-to-be-exact coordinates.
Once the four astronauts surpass 248,655 miles, they will be farther away from the soil of this planet than any human being has ever been, and will keep going until they are more than 252,000 miles away. It is a journey that would certainly — if somehow we could flash awareness of this instant into the past — earn the stop-in-their-tracks wonder and appreciation and gratitude of countless generations of awestruck human beings, all gone now, who looked up at the night sky, at its vastness, and marveled.
Not so much now. We live in a time when it seems harder to simply marvel anymore, when we collectively look down at the devices that occupy our hands far more than we look at stars and sky. Maybe in that distraction, in that relentless focus on self and the subsequent drift from humility, is the reason why — as a species on this planet — we so often find ourselves exactly where we are now.
In losing our sense of feeling small, we lose the drop-to-our-knees awareness of what it means – viewing the cosmos – by truly reaching far.
At 1:56 p.m., whatever we are doing, this is a chance.
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