With Luck, New Views of our Earth: Artemis II

[August1991]

1. Around the world, many planes take off and land safely.

Nowadays, the pilots are women and men, have light skin or dark - born in Africa or America: they can fly a plane.

2. Look at the names of the people who launched/sent satellites/devices far into space.

Who designed such devices? We can still communicate with Voyageur I and II.

3. Around the world, people will know how to see this.

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Here's my point: 

It is not that we can merely get along. It is that we live in a world where ordinary people can now fly a plane, do calculus. Ordinary people can use a phone to text. 

[August1991]

Ordinary people? Maybe I should have said common people.

[August1991]

The mission itself? It is not hard to get a rocket up. Bezos has done that. Shepard did that.

It is hard to get a rocket going fast enough that it doesn't fall back down.

We imagine the universe in three-dimensions when in fact it is four dimensions. But maybe it is better to imagine space in two dimensions:

On Earth, we live on the Prairies at the bottom of a sink-hole. We can send somethings fast enough to circle the hole but to get out of this hole, we must send it very fast.

The Moon is another sink-hole - far away. We managed to send the Apollo modules out of our Earth gravity to circle within the Moon sink-hole.

This Artemis II mission will push people to the upper edges of the Moon sink-hole.