I have been telling people that Artemis is the most wholesome obsession I have had in a long time. Bear with me as I reflect a little. I get back to schools, eventually.
I did not expect to be so moved by a space mission, but at a time when so much of what captures our attention feels frantic or cynical, this felt different. It was sincere, funny, and brave, the kind of thing you want to share because it reminds you that not everything vying for our attention has to drain us.
Of course, I understood that the mission was significant. The scale is almost impossible to comprehend: years of planning, thousands of people, a spacecraft traveling around the Moon, and a crew trusting the math, the systems, the training, the vehicle, and one another. What stayed with me most, though, was how human it all felt, and how, in the middle of all that precision, joy kept breaking through.
Rise, the little zero-gravity indicator, floated through the Orion spacecraft, designed by an 8-year-old and selected from more than 2,600 entries. Victor playfully spun in circles in the microgravity of the spacecraft. And Reid, while orbiting the Moon, was still somehow dealing with the same earthly frustrations the rest of us face at our desks: “I have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one of those are working.” Even space travel, apparently, does not free us from Outlook.
That same joy showed up when “Pink Pony Club” was the wake-up song and it cut off before the chorus. We heard Christina say, “Call them, call them!” meaning Mission Control. She needed more of the song. Of course she did. How could she not? Later, after splashdown, while still inside the spacecraft on the Pacific, she shared M&M’s with the crew she had put in her spacesuit pocket before re-entry.
That got me, too! In the middle of heat shields and lunar trajectories and ocean recovery teams, Christina had thought to tuck some M&M’s away to share. The mission was full of those moments, not distractions from the seriousness of it, but reminders of what the seriousness was for.
Some of the most powerful moments were the tender ones, the ones that reminded us who was inside the spacecraft. I was moved when the crew named a crater after Reid’s late wife. Victor offered words on Easter that felt like a blessing. Christina said, “We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”
That line has stayed with me because Artemis was not only about leaving Earth. It was about seeing Earth differently. We saw the Moon in ways most of us have never seen it before, not as a flat white circle in the night sky, but as a place of shadow, texture, silence, and scale. And then we saw Earth from the perspective of the Moon, small and luminous and impossibly fragile. It is one thing to know, intellectually, that Earth is our shared home. It is another thing to see it hanging there.
Maybe that is why Artemis felt so emotional. It was not only about how far they went. It was about what that distance revealed.
The teams on the ground helped us understand what we were seeing, too. I loved listening to Kelsey, one of the scientists in Mission Control, as the astronauts described what they were seeing. She was interpreting and guiding, while also clearly feeling the magnitude of the moment. “You really brought the Moon closer for us today, and we cannot say thank you enough,” she told them.
And when Kelsey heard one of their descriptions and exclaimed, “Amaze, amaze, amaze,” echoing Project Hail Mary, it felt like exactly the right response. It wasn’t polished or formal. It was just delight in real time. Her giddiness when Reid described visible impact flashes on the far side of the moon was its own kind of joy.
Here’s a screenshot of Dr. Kelsey Young's (NASA geologist and planetary science specialist and the Artemis Science Flight Operations Lead) reaction to hearing that the astronauts can see meteorites impacting the far side of the moon.
I felt that same gratitude for Leah, the NASA Public Affairs Officer who narrated so much of the livestream. Her voice became part of the experience for me: calm, steady, and reassuring. She helped us understand what we were seeing without over-explaining it. Leah reminded me how much it matters to have someone who can translate complexity and still let the moment breathe.
And of course, there was Jacki, who gave us the phrase that now feels like the title of the whole experience: “Copy, moon joy.” There’s even a movement online to get it written in her handwriting so people can have it tattooed. That’s how deeply this mission seemed to land for people.
Maybe it landed because the mission never felt like it belonged only to the astronauts. We heard the voices from Mission Control and saw the scientists responding in real time. We listened to Leah carry us through the livestream. Again and again, Artemis reminded us how many people it takes to make a dream real.
I keep thinking about a comment Jeremy made while in space: “To get big things done, you need a big team behind you. Share your dreams with others.”
It is easy to talk about big ideas as if they belong to one visionary person, but Artemis was a reminder that big dreams are collective. Someone has to be brave enough to say the dream out loud, and then a whole team has to decide, day after day, to help make it real. The courage of the crew was remarkable, but so was the work of the thousands of people behind them. The crew seemed to understand that they were carrying all of those people with them: the people who built the systems, guided the mission, narrated the story, planned the recovery, supported them at home, and helped imagine what might float in zero gravity.
Seeing the team behind the mission did not make Artemis feel less extraordinary. It made the achievement feel more human, and even more remarkable.
Of course, that feels true far beyond space travel. So much of our work in schools asks us to be serious. The stakes are real. Enrollment is real. Finances are real. Families’ choices are real. Strategy, data, and execution matter. But Artemis reminded me that people are not moved by information alone. They are moved when a mission feels alive.
We know that is true for schools, too. The strongest school communities are not built only through programs, outcomes, dashboards, or plans. They are built in the moments when people feel the purpose of the place: when a child feels understood, a family feels known, a tradition starts to carry meaning, or a community finds language for what it believes and then lives it in small, visible ways.
That is what I kept seeing in Artemis. Ambition, precision, and risk were all present, but so were affection, play, and trust. It is easy, in serious work, to strip out the very things that make people care. We can become so focused on proving value that we forget to create meaning. We can explain the mission without making anyone feel part of it.
Artemis did both. It gave us the math and the engineering. It gave us the return through fire. But it also gave us “Copy, moon joy.” It gave us a view of Earth that made home feel both tiny and precious, and all those small human moments that made the vastness feel intimate.
As Kelsey said, the mission brought the Moon closer. But it also brought us closer to each other, at least for a moment.
I look at the Moon differently now. It brings me back to the joy of the mission, and to the strange comfort of remembering that we are all looking up at the same thing.
Wishing you well as you wrap up the year.
