Vehicle Assembly Building, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida
Artemis
We had a family trip to Kennedy Space Center, something we’ve done a few times, but this year we got to see some things we’d never witnessed before. We saw a wonderful Imax film about the James Webb Space Telescope, listened to a talk by a real life NASA astronaut, went on a tour of the launch facilities and wandered around the rocket displays from past efforts.
All wonderful, but there was this time the added excitement of an upcoming launch. Inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (the VAB as they refer to it – this week’s image), sits the Artemis rocket which will eventually take people back to the moon.
As NASA puts it “Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.”
To get even a glimpse of the future for space, with a launch now tentatively scheduled for early April that will take the astronauts to the furthest point in space we’ve ever been as a species, was a thrill. As I told grandson Theo, I’ve been a space effort follower since the very early days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and I was fortunate enough to have watched 2 shuttle launches live in Florida. We chatted about how the efforts have changed but how mankind’s desire to explore driven by a thirst for knowledge is almost universal, and about how very interesting those efforts are and how they’ve advanced our civilization so very far.
As we learned in the film about the JWST, gazing back to the very beginnings of the universe some 13 and a half billion years ago helps us understand the size and evolution of the planet we inhabit. Listening to the astronaut talk about his voyage to space we realize how dangerous and yet essential the exploration is.
Putting it all together – it’s an exciting time coming up for NASA as humans once again head for the Moon and beyond. Exciting to think about what we may yet learn and come to understand.
