The Artemis II Moonshot Deserves Your Awe, and Your Closer Attention, Too

Travel to space has become commonplace. In the past three decades, nearly 300 people have flown to and from the International Space Station, some of them residing there for months at a time . In the past several years, the rocket startup Blue Origin has launched a series of day trips just over the threshold into space -- high-end carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King and William Shatner. The Artemis II lunar mission is different. NASA's spaceflight, which lifted off Wednesday evening, is carrying four astronauts round-trip all the way to the moon -- roughly 250,000 miles from earth, it's a thousand times farther away than the space station -- and they'll have to break free from Earth's gravity to do so. It's a trip that only two dozen humans have ever taken, and the last time it happened was in 1972. Artemis II's Orion spacecraft will also take its four astronauts farther than any humans have ever traveled into space, on a long arc reaching 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon. By contrast, the Apollo astronauts 50-plus years ago were snuggled into a lunar orbit just 70 or so miles from the surface. This will be a massive achievement for NASA in its own right. It is also a harbinger of a new and disruptive era in the still-unfolding Space Age. Yet it hardly seems to be making a dent in the national conversation. For sure, there's a lot going on here on Earth that's on the front of many people's minds. Military conflict. Government gridlock. Political protests. Anxiety about the cost of living and adequate health care. But that was true back in the '60s and early '70s as well, and perhaps never more so than in the years right around the first moon landing in July 1969, Apollo 11 's one giant leap for mankind. I was a kid when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin put their bootprints into the dusty lunar terrain, and I vividly remember the nonstop TV coverage. I eagerly tuned in to see the splashdowns as the astronauts from all the Apollo spaceflights returned to Earth. It was a gripping, heroic narrative. Those Apollo moon missions were the culmination of the first wave of space exploration, a decade and a half filled with remarkable feats, one after another. The Artemis missions mark the start of a whole new era of space exploitation. A view of Earth rising over the moon's horizon, taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft in July 1969. NASA Watch this: Watch NASA's Artemis II Launch to the Moon 12:49 The ultimate goal for NASA: A moon base Artemis II won't put astronauts on the lunar surface. Like the historic Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 -- the first to send humans beyond Earth's orbit, the one that gave us our first view of our planet as a blue orb against a sea of deep black -- it's a flyby in preparation for an eventual landing. That touchdown by astronauts will happen in the Artemis IV mission, currently scheduled for early 2028. NASA's longer-term goals include the establishment of a lunar base to achieve "an endu