There are questions that have no easy answers, yet deserve to be asked. Why return to the Moon?
Why now, when the world seems so broken, so divided, so urgently in need of attention down here?
Perhaps it is precisely because, in those moments when we feel smallest—most fragile, most lost in our own contradictions—that we most need to look upward.
I do not know if it was chance, destiny, the will of some forgotten god, or something infinitely stranger that placed the Moon at exactly the perfect distance to be reachable through effort, yet not with ease. At 384,400 kilometers—not so close as to be ignored, yet not so far as to make us give up. An invitation calculated with a precision that defies mere coincidence. A threshold. The first step of a staircase that vanishes into the darkness of the galaxy.
What is certain is that humanity has been dreaming of that step for nearly two thousand years.
In the second century AD, the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata penned the first detailed account of a journey to the Moon in the Western tradition—a work many also consider to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction in history. His work, Vera Historia—"True History"—remains the oldest known text to feature outer space travel, alien life forms, and interplanetary warfare.
With humor and satire, Lucian described a war between the inhabitants of the Sun and the Moon over the colonization of the Morning Star. It was fiction, yes. It was satire, too. But above all, it was the reflection of a human mind that could no longer confine its dreams within the visible horizon.
Two thousand years later, here we stand. And the question Lucian posed back in the second century remains as relevant as ever:
What is stopping us from going?
For the past hundred years, the answer has invariably been the same combination of obstacles: impossible physics, non-existent materials, absent political will, or simply the weight of our own fears. Each solution seemed only to open up three new problems. Every breakthrough revealed a new layer of complexity. Reaching the Moon was, perhaps, the most difficult technical feat humanity has ever undertaken—not because the universe stood against us, but because we ourselves almost failed to try.
And yet, we did it.
And now, with Artemis II, we return. Not to plant a flag. Not to win a race. But to learn how to stay.
I sometimes think that if our only neighboring options were Venus or Mars—inhospitable, distant worlds, lacking that luminous, nearby presence in the night sky—perhaps we never would have had the courage to take the first step. The Moon taught us to dream of what lies just beyond our reach. It trained us to be travelers of the cosmos before becoming settlers of other worlds. It is the patient teacher that has been waiting for us.
I am fully aware that this planet bears open wounds. Wars that never end, inequalities that deepen, climate changes that will not wait. No amount of romanticism can mask those realities. And yet, I believe—with the same conviction with which my mother taught me to gaze at the sky when I was a child—that space exploration is not a luxury we can afford to forgo. It is, if anything, one of the few projects that has historically demonstrated that we are capable of working together, of solving the impossible, and of elevating the very best within us.
Artemis II is not an escape from our problems. It is a reminder of what we are capable of becoming when we decide that something is worth the effort.
Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Christina Koch, Mission Specialist Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen do not travel on behalf of a single nation. They travel on behalf of a species. An imperfect, contradictory, sometimes cruel species—yet one also capable of a tenderness, a creativity, and a courage that find no parallel anywhere else in the known universe.
Almost two thousand years ago, Lucian imagined humanity traversing the cosmos in ships swept along by whirlwinds. Today, it does so atop rockets that burn a million kilograms of propellant in eight minutes to escape the gravity of this beautiful world.
The dream remains the same. We have merely improved the engineering.
Let us accept the challenge. Not because it is easy, but because we have spent two thousand years preparing for it.
The Moon awaits us. And beyond it, the galaxy.
