I cried watching Artemis II land

Like most people, I saw Project Hail Mary spoilers on TikTok because the algorithm will always spoil things for you. I obviously fell in love with Rocky and gave my husband no other option than to go see the movie with me the next day. OBSESSED. IN LOVE. Buying the DVD as soon as it comes out.

And then NASA started showing up on my For You page, quoting lines from the movie and just being so adorable. NASA, posting like a fan account, draws a straight line between a fictional story about what humans are capable of and the real thing they are currently doing. 👎

That really got me.

I checked the news more than I should have. I read updates. I watched clips. I am not someone who normally follows space missions in real time, but I could not look away.

Maybe it was because I had learned their names. Reid Wiseman. Victor Glover. Christina Koch. Jeremy Hansen. Maybe because their online presence was undeniable. Maybe because I know their faces. I watched interviews where they talked about what this means to them, what it means to their families, and what it means to do this particular thing at this particularly... tough ... moment in history. (& all the Christina thirst traps definitely had an impact too. No shame.)

Christina Koch is the first woman to travel to lunar distance. The first. In all of human history, in all the years we have been pointing ourselves to space, she is the first woman to go this far. & We're here to see it! In my lifetime! I got to watch the first woman travel around the moon!

I have been sitting with that for almost a week, and I still do not have the right words for it.

Don't get me started on Carroll

One of the crew members lost his wife. Her name was Carroll. And during the mission, a feature on the moon's surface was named after her.

He loved her to the moon and back.

I do not know how you hold something like that. I do not know how you suit up, and climb into a spacecraft, and do something so brave while carrying grief that big. I can barely get out of bed with the small amount of grief I have. But he did that! They all did. And somewhere on the dark side of the moon, there's a beautiful spot named Carroll. & There she'll be forever. A reminder of love.

I'll be crying over that for the rest of my existence.

Copy, moon joy.

The moment that broke the internet, and honestly broke me a little too, was not something the crew said. It was what Science Officer Angela Garcia said back to them.

The crew was describing the lunar surface of the dark side of the moon. They were up there, right there, and they were trying to put into words what they were seeing. The awe of it. 

And Angela Garcia, back on Earth, receiving all of that wonder from 230,000 miles away, responded:

"Copy, moon joy."
I received that. I heard you. Your joy got here!

That is one human being telling four other human beings, who are farther from home than any people have been in fifty years, that their wonder matters. That someone is on the other end of it. That they are not out there alone with that feeling.

It went viral immediately, and I understand why.

I could not look away from the TV during the landing. I kept thinking about the physics of it, this capsule coming back through the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour, the heat shield doing the thing it was built to do (& about the issues with Artemis I), and inside it four people waiting. I love to assume that the loss of communication was intentional so they could scream and shout and let it out while barreling towards earth in their space van.

The parachutes deployed, and something in my chest loosened.... well, after that final parachute sorted itself out.

And then the capsule hit the water, and my mother-in-law and I teared up and could finally exhale.

& After what felt like an eternity, they finally came out onto the "porch" .... They were okay. They were smiling. They were there.

I watched the crew come out of that capsule, and I thought: These are good people. Not perfect people, not superhero people, just genuinely good people who decided to do something extraordinary and then did it. And the whole world got to watch. And for ten days, we all cared about the same thing.

I remember the last time we all felt unified, but it was only after tragedy. This was different.

There are still good things happening in the world. There are still people doing impossible things for reasons that have nothing to do with money or fame or any other out-of-touch thing we are all so tired of seeing. Sometimes the reason is just ... We wanted to go. We wanted to see. We wanted to know if we could. We wanted to grow. We wanted to expand. We wanted to learn.

Copy, moon joy.