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From Sputnik to Artemis, the future moves at the speed of light

As I write this, an astronaut quartet races toward a rendezvous with the moon at more than 1,700 miles per hour.

They’re dawdling.

Every cloudless, fog-free morning, my wife and I have the privilege and delight of awakening to a view across the water of the city of Gig Harbor.

That lovely scenery comes to me courtesy of mostly solar light that arrives on our planet at more than 186,000,000 miles per second. No dawdling there.

Chapin’s view on a recent morning.

At this time of year, it dramatically emblazons window panes in the ridge-top Gig Harbor View East Apartments before bouncing back across the harbor into our kitchen at roughly the same speed.

At 6:54 a.m. on Saturday, March 4, that fiery display was matched in close conjunction with a near-full moon’s cold lunar light which — in my layman’s grasp of the matter — I thought must have originated on the sun a teensy-weensy, super-micronic, mini-gazillionth of a second later, given its additional near 460,000-mile roundtrip past Earth back to our breakfast counter.

Wow. So cool.

In that moment of wonderment, combined with news of the Artemis II, I took a picture.

The resulting photo transported me back to a crisp October night in 1957.  I was 13. With a marveling, concerned, even somewhat fearful group of neighbors, I stood on a lawn peering at the sky to follow a tiny white dot moving straight across the heavens.

Usually concerned with more weighty matters — like whether I could save enough paper route money to buy blue suede shoes before they went out of style or whether I should use tonic or wax on my butch haircut — here I was gazing at the future.

Oh, I saw Sputnik I, that primitive little beeping bundle of Russian space craft, all right.  Just missed the part about the future.

Others of my classmates and generation understood, contributing to and profiting from the dawning Space Age.

I spaced out, not in the sense of interest but in the sense of opportunity.  I celebrated space achievements, honored its heroes, and mourned its tragedies. Later in life, I even wrote about them for newspapers and television, all without becoming a space junkie.

Now I’m an ol’ retired guy, the sort whose preoccupations tend toward other concerns, like my checklist before leaving the house: wallet, keys, phone? Got a tee time? Good to go.

But now these latest space pioneers, en route to view what no human has seen in person, have rekindled my interest, even my envy, in what they’ll find.  Sure, right along with other taxpayers, I’ll be concerned about the dollar costs, the human risks, the impacts on national and world affairs.

But my hope is that they will discover something of value to humanity and that distracted 13-year-olds worldwide will be inspired to pay more attention to the future than I was.

God speed and safe return Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen.

Chapin Day

Former journalist and yacht broker Day, an occasional contributor to Gig Harbor Now, lives in Gig Harbor with his wife Janet and hopes to continue doing so for many more years.