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Anxious for the next manned space flight

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All right, kids. I might be the only red-blooded American patriot who thinks this way, but dammit … I am anxious for the next Artemis space flight to the moon.

Artemis III will launch in 2027 (I think) and will carry another four-person crew. The next flight is supposed to land on the surface and the astronauts will get to scurry around the lunar landscape doing an assortment of this and that experiments.

Why so anxious? Well, I want to cheer these men and women on to great success. I also want the TV airwaves and Internet channels to focus on something other than the political feces being tossed around. Yep, the news cycles are boring me out of my mind.

Space travel was put on the shelf for 50 years or so. Apollo 17 was the final lunar mission that NASA launched in 1972 … until Artemis II rocketed into space for that glorious lunar orbit mission and sent home those astonishing pictures of the dark sideof the moon.

I don’t believe I am the only American waiting for a return to space. Just know that this kind of adventure gets my heart pumpiing. So does some of the political rhetoric I hear, but the ticker pumps heavily for the wrong reasons.

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Yes, let’s go back to the moon!

President Kennedy had a rare talent for putting current events into context, for making us ponder the value of what we were about to undertake.

“We don’t seek to land on the moon because it is easy,” JFK said in a speech at Rice University in Houston. “We do it because it is hard.” Yes, the task of meeting Kennedy’s end-of-the 1960s goal of landing a man on the moon and “returning him safely to the Earth” was arguably the most challenging assignment ever handed to Americans.

We succeeded on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind” on the lunar surface.

Eleven more men would walk on the moon before we ended that program in 1972. But … we’re about to return to the one deep-space body that contains human footprints.

I am one American who relishes the idea of watching the next generation of astronauts continue our journey into the unknown of our world’s creation. Artemis II is set to take off soon. It will carry four astronauts to the moon. It will carry the first Black astronaut, the first female astronaut and the first astronaut from another country.

The question persists: Why do this again? I believe we should do it because we have a lot more to learn about the moon. The final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, brought back a trove of info on the moon. Did it close the book? Did it answer every question we ever will ask about Earth’s sole orbiting body? Hah!

I am delighted to see American ingenuity being put to work once again. Artemis II’s task will be to ferry space travelers 250,000 miles from Earth and bring them home safely. What’s more, as with the Apollo program, we have a race to win. This one is with China, which is planning a lunar landing of its own. NASA’s plans call for Artemis to land a crew in 2028.

Bruce McCandless, who’s written extensively about space travel, writes in an op-ed published Sunday in the Dallas Morning News, “You don’t get to be good at space travel by thinking about it. You get there by going.”

And so, we’ll be “going” there once more to fulfill humankind’s quest for knowledge.