“And I said to myself…what a wonderful world.”
— Louis Armstrong
On April 1, 2026, I found myself feeling very small.
I was at work—sitting in an empty mattress store, watching the Artemis II launch on my phone— yet still, I felt small.
Not insignificant.
Not invisible.
Just small.
Small in the way you feel when something reminds you that the world is bigger than whatever’s been living in your head and inside your heart.
Like a lot of Gen X kids, I learned early that spaceflight isn’t just wonder, it’s risk. I remember the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster vividly.
A classroom TV. My third-grade teacher desperately trying to hold it together for a room full of scared and confused eight-year-olds. The confusion before anyone had words for what we’d just seen.
So even now, decades later, I caught myself holding my breath until the solid rocket boosters peeled away.
As that rocket climbed, I felt that familiar childlike lump in my throat. The kind you try to swallow because you still have to be ready to talk about coil counts and lumbar support.
Let’s get real: right now, our country and our world feels heavy.
War. Violence. Inflation. Division. Noise that never quite turns off.
It’s all there, all the time, like pressure you don’t notice until something finally shifts it.
And then this rocket cuts through it.
And suddenly you remember, we’ve been here before.
1968
A year that makes 2026 feel a little less unprecedented.
Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated.
Robert F. Kennedy assassinated.
Vietnam escalating.
Cities burning.
A country that feels like it’s being held together by duct tape and bailing wire.
And in the middle of all that, we went to the Moon.
On Christmas Eve, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the book of Genesis while in lunar orbit. Not as a sermon, but as three human beings trying to make sense of where they were.
A quarter of a million miles from home.
And then astronaut William Anders turned his camera and captured something no one had ever seen before:
Earth.
Small. Blue. Fragile. Alone in the dark.
Earthrise has become one of the most important photographs in human history.
Not simply because of its beauty, but the perspective.
A reminder that everything happening down here—good, bad, and ugly—was happening on the same tiny, shared rock.
Yet somehow, that didn’t make things feel more hopeless.
It made them feel survivable.
That’s what came back to me watching Artemis II.
Not the technology. Not the scale.
The pattern.
Because when things get heavy…humans go exploring.
And this time, the story isn’t just about the mission. It’s about the people inside it.
Commander Reid Wiseman lost his wife, Carroll to cancer in 2020. And somewhere along the way, he honored her in a way that only makes sense when you think about what space does to a person: he named a crater on the Moon after her.
Sit with that.
Grief, carried over a quarter-million miles away, and placed somewhere permanent.
Not hidden. Not outrun. Just…given a place.
And now we’re getting these new images of the Moon: sharper, clearer, more detailed than anything we’ve had before. Terrain we’ve seen for decades, suddenly rendered with new depth. Familiar, but not the same.
That feels like something, too.
Because grief does that.
Time doesn’t erase it. It changes the resolution.
What was once just a shape becomes something more defined. Edges you couldn’t see before coming into focus. And somehow, in seeing it more clearly, you learn how to carry it.
That’s what struck me about this crew.
Different lives. Different paths.
A man who lost his partner.
A pilot who had to reimagine his future.
A woman breaking barriers that stood for generations.
A man representing a country that had never made this journey before.
Because what made me feel small in that moment wasn’t the size of the rocket.
It was the reminder that these are just humans.
People who have lost something. People who have had to start over. People who kept going anyway.
All spending a week and a half on the same fragile vessel, floating through the darkness.
Apollo 8 and Artemis II are not the same mission.
Different eras. Different goals.
But maybe they share something deeper than their flight paths.
Maybe they exist for the same reason:
Because sometimes, when life gets too loud, we need distance from the noise to hear what matters.
Back to that launch. As I sat there in that empty store, watching that rocket disappear into the sky, I didn’t feel hope in some grand, cinematic way.
It was quieter than that.
More personal.
More like a reminder than a solution.
That even in a heavy world, we still find ways to reach beyond it.
Not to escape.
But to see it clearly enough…to come back and keep going.
And maybe that’s the real work.
Not fixing everything all at once.
Simply stepping back far enough to remind ourselves that this world is still worth holding onto.
—
Olga Ernst on Wikimedia Under CC License
