I was almost 9 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I have vague memories of watching it live. I recently texted my now 28 year old son:

The Artemis thing is good and all, but, in some ways, it feels like an echo of the momentous events of the original landing/space race. I doubt, for instance, the David Bowies and Pink Floyds of today will be obsessed enough with it to be writing major songs about it for 5 years. On July 20, 1969 the whole world stopped.

And I got cheap plastic records of mission control in cereal boxes as promos.

Beyond the vague memories of the event there was a huge buildup in expectations and fascination with the fact of the achievement:

• There was Sputnik (and Jules Verne’s From The Earth to the Moon long before that)
• There was the JFK speech before congress pitching it “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
• On TV were Lost In Space, I Dream of Jeannie and Star Trek.
• There was Disney’s “Tomorrow Land” with a space focus.
• There was a worldwide audience for Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, including me at 8 years old up past my bedtime.
• The day after the landing the Beatles went into the studio and dusted off a song called “Come Together”. True, it was originally written as a campaign song for Timothy Leary’s run for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan (!), but they went back to a song about unity the day after an event that unified the world. OK, maybe this is forced, but as a Beatles fan I had to work this in :-)
• In the years following the fascination continued as evidenced more or less directly by Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and others.
• And of course a little further on we got Star Wars (and Space Balls !), ET, and the Star Trek re-boot.
• The International Space Station was, in part, an attempt to continue the vision that the conquest of space was a collective human project.
• My take is that the success of the Star Trek franchise and the existence of SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc. are a continuation of the optimism born in the original push to the moon. Occupy Mars!

So, Artemis. That’s what got me thinking about all this and recounting my “lived experience” through the space age (I was born the year of Kennedy’s speech). Yes, Artemis is a good thing. News of the return to space/the Moon is positive. We need more of that. I certainly hope the world has more unity, and we have a Canadian on board this time, Eh? Maybe it will not occasion the cultural obsession it did first time around, but instead be next “small step for man” into the “Final Frontier”. Here’s hoping…