There's been a lot of depressing news lately. The rise of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism around the globe, an unstable stock market and economy being manipulated by White House for private gain at the cost of tax-payers and consumers, wars and genocides, irreversible climate change tipping points being tipped, and so much more. But through all that, there was one shining bright moment this past 2 weeks: The launch and successful landing of NASA's Artemis II mission. For the first time in more than a generation, human beings have travelled beyond near Earth orbit and around the moon. Sadly, this was a manned test run of the capsule, and so this mission did not land on the moon. For that, we will have to wait till 2028, at least.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II crew: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Hammock Koch.

Space exploration has felt rather stagnant for decades. The focus on the space shuttle and space station programs kept manned space flight in near Earth orbit, while deep space missions have all been done by robots. There's been quite a few robotic missions. Multiple rovers have landed on Mars, some of which are still active long past their expected expiration dates. Probes have visited the planets of the outer solar system (as well as the not-a-planet-anymore Pluto). And probes have even done test landings on asteroids and comets! I do not want to diminish these accomplishments one bit. They are all extraordinary technological and scientific breakthroughs on their own. Landing on asteroids and comets is especially significant, because they are a stepping stone towards mining and resource extraction from such celestial bodies, which could hopefully pave the way for abandoning our capitalist economic systems in favor of a post-scarcity model. But as cool as these missions were, they haven't been manned missions. People weren't actually going to these places.

At least not until now. With Artemis II, a group of 4 human beings (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen) travelled around the moon, and saw the far side of the moon with their own, human, eyes. That is something that hasn't happened since the Apollo missions of the early 1970's.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II witnessed the Earth "set" behind the far side of the moon.

This morning, the first step on the road to a manned mission to Mars was taken. NASA's Orion space capsule successfully completed its first dual-orbital test flight and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

The space craft finally launched this morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force base a little after 7 am Eastern time, after having been delayed for a day due to technical problems and poor weather. After a four-and-a-half-hour flight in which the spacecraft orbited the Earth twice at an altitude of 3600 miles, the capsule re-entered the atmosphere, deployed its parachutes, and landed gently in the Pacific Ocean.

This flight is the first step in a planned manned mission to Mars that is expected to take place within the next 25 years, assuming that it doesn't get derailed by political or monetary issues.

This is exactly the kind of mission that advocates argued would be encouraged by the termination of the space shuttle program. Critics argued that the space shuttle made access to earth's orbit too easy and reliable, and "tethered" NASA to low-earth orbit, instead of finding innovative new ways to reach further into space...