Millions in the streets. An unpopular war. Violence. And in the middle of all that: a moonshot.
The parallels between today and 1968 are eerie.
Nearly 60 years ago, civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam-war rallies burst across the country. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Police beat protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
A congressional committee stated that “the mental picture that many foreigners have of our nation is increasingly that of a violent, lawless, overbearing, even sick society.”
At year’s end, fearing that the rival Soviet Union would launch a cosmonaut to the moon, the U.S. sent its first crew there.
The daring Apollo 8 mission was only the second time humans had flown the spacecraft and the first time they had journeyed to another object in our solar system.
Orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, the astronauts read from the opening of Genesis on live television. One woman wrote NASA that the mission had “saved” 1968.
That message was underscored by the iconic color “Earthrise” photo. The poet Archibald MacLeish also wrote a front-page New York Times essay, saying we are all “brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
Today, “No Kings” protests draw huge crowds to oppose President Donald Trump, standing up against masked federal agents abducting people; the illegal surprise attack on Iran; corruption; and inflation.
Americans have been killed by ICE in full view of cameras, and twice in the last two years would-be assassins have gone after Trump himself.
And then came our era’s moonshot, Artemis II, whose four astronauts have returned safely to Earth after a lunar flyby, the first time humans have been in the vicinity of the moon since 1972.
Last week commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen traveled 252,756 miles from Earth — the farthest any humans have ever been.
A cynic might say, given the state of Earth, perhaps they should have stayed up there. But astronauts are anything but cynical.
A nearly flawless test mission of the Orion capsule — well, there were toilet problems — unfolded from a literally brilliant launch to the stately splashdown.
Last week, more than 600,000 people watched the NASA YouTube channel as the crew saw the moon as it truly is, a sublime, wild, awesome place — as Koch put it, “not just a poster in the sky.”
She offered metaphor after metaphor, bringing the moon into focus, noting that bright, small craters dotted the surface like “a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through.”
