Second Star to the Right

Last Thursday night, NBC aired a live production of Peter Pan.  Eight hours later, NASA launched the Orion spacecraft.  The precursor to the first manned flight to Mars, getting us closer to that second star to the right than ever before.  That can’t be a coincidence.

The Orion constellation gets its name from the legendary Greek hunter and demigod son of Poseidon, but the constellation has been a focus of religions around the the world since we first looked up and pondered the depths of our mind and space.  Pyramids in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan (Place of the Gods) and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt were erected to align with the stars known as Orion’s Belt, and the constellation is also referenced multiple times in the Judeo-Christian Bible with the Hebrew word “Kesil,” which means “fool.”  That comes from the root “Kesel” (which is, also likely not coincidentally, the root for the Hebrew month of Kislev, which we are now in), meaning “hope.”

Fool and hope...  I like those.  It must take a little of both to pull off something amazing like landing a man on Mars.  Just look at what it took to get a man on the Moon.

From the time the first person dreamed of stepping foot on the Moon, to the first flight by the Wright brothers in 1903, to the formation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1915, which paved the way for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to open shop in 1958, all the way through the space wars of the late 1950s and 1960s and the ultimate Moon landing, a lot of foolish hope must have been mustered to push on.  There were countless setbacks.  Millions of dollars spent.  Dozens of missions failed.  Four Pioneer space probes destroyed.  Eleven American lives tragically lost during testing and training.  But then, on July 16, 1969, at 9:32 AM, EDT, the rockets of Apollo 11 cleared the tower of the Kennedy Space Center.  

At 9:44, the craft enters into Earth’s orbit.  On July 19th, the Moon’s.  

July 20th, Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin begin their descent to the Moon’s surface aboard the lunar module Eagle.  At 4:18 EDT, the first manned spacecraft touches down on the Moon.  

And on July 21, 1969, at 10:56 EDT, Neil Armstrong, with one small step, takes a giant leap and sets the first footprint down on the surface of the Moon.

We’ve taken a lot of steps since then.  We’ve built an international space station.  We landed on Mars.  On a comet.  We have spacecrafts charting the farthest reaches of the universe and giving us glimpses of planets that have never even been seen by the naked eye.  We have gone further than those first stargazers could have ever thought possible.  But in a lot of other ways, we haven’t gone anywhere at all.  

As it was in the 1960s, during the race for space, we find ourselves in a tense stand-off with Russia, which has started gobbling back up land that hasn’t been under its control since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  The threat of nuclear war has only multiplied and continues to grow with every spin of a centrifuge in Iran.  The Middle East is still fractured and threatening to explode.  We still find ourselves mired in a war on a foreign land which we can’t escape from.  Race relations in America are returning to a boiling pitch and Washington’s streets are once again feeling the pounding of angry and disillusioned marchers.  And in some ways, things have gotten even worse.  Islamist extremism and climate change pose real or imagined threats to our world on an existential level.  At times, it gets difficult to believe things will ever get better.

But we can’t give up.  We need to hold onto the foolish hope that we can change things.  That we can make them better.  Even when all rational thought and evidence is pointing us to the contrary, we have to believe it can get better.  Because sometimes, just believing in something strongly enough is all you need to give it life.