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Larry Wilson: The magnificent return to the moon

April 4, 2026

I had forgotten how much of a spacehead I am until late Wednesday afternoon.

I’d written a note to myself on my daily to-do list: “3:24, check out the Artemis launch,” though I truthfully hadn’t thought that much about this initial flight of a brand-new kind of rocket and a brand-new spacecraft that would be the first mission toward mankind’s return to the moon after half a century.

But a little after 3, I searched out the NASA livestream from Cape Canaveral and Houston to see if the weather in Florida, or any technical glitches small or large, were still allowing the launch window to remain open.

As it turns out, all systems were go. No hurricanes moving in. A technical glitch was handled with interesting aplomb when a committee guessed that the sensor saying a battery wasn’t working was itself broken, not the battery. You could hear the excitement building in the comms people’s voices when they realized that the several T-minus whatever — 30 minutes, then 10 minutes — deadlines were going forward. The candle was really gonna be lighted.

I was hooked.

By launch time, I was in my car on the way to an early Dodger game, but I couldn’t put my phone down. I plugged it into the car’s audio. Happily I was at a stop light right when the engines on the 322-foot-tall rocket, weighing 5.75 million pounds, were ignited, and I glanced down to the shotgun seat on which my phone sat, feeling a mixture of awe and trepidation. We are all too aware that these things can go well or they can go boom. But absolutely nothing went wrong.

“We have a beautiful moonrise and we’re headed right at it,” said Reid Wiseman, the commander of the mission, and the four-person crew was headed into space. With person the operative word here. For the first time, a woman, 47-year-old electrical engineer Christina Koch, is going to the moon. So is the first non-American, Canadian physicist and fighter pilot Jeremy Hansen. And so is the first Black person, Pomona native Victor Glover, also a combat pilot.

I was absolutely chuffed to read that every day as he headed into work before the flight, Glover listened to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” a truly remarkable song from 1970. Remember it? “A rat done bit my sister Nell / with Whitey on the moon / her face and arms began to swell / and Whitey’s on the moon / I can’t pay no doctor bill / but Whitey’s on the moon / 10 years from now I’ll be paying still / while Whitey’s on the moon.”

No more insightful argument from the camp of Americans who have always said, “Why are we going to space when we have so many problems here on Earth?” has ever been articulated. And I’ll always remember waxing ecstatic about some space mission when talking with my teacher, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. “It’s of no interest to me, Lawrence,” he said. “I’ve got all I can handle down here.”

But I was raised on this stuff, as were so many of us in Southern California, where space exploration was created. At Aerojet in Azusa, my chemist father helped develop the liquid-propellant engines that carried the first Americans into space.

The race with Russia to get to the moon was one of the defining political, scientific and even cultural events of my childhood and teens. And then, in 1972, the whole thing just stopped, or stayed in Earth orbit.

I realize that this Artemis II mission is just going to slingshot around the moon, not land on it. But if all goes well, we’ll touch down there again soon. Along with Scott-Heron, astronaut Glover has been listening a lot to Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” also from the Apollo era: “Rockets, moon shots / spend it on the have-nots.” That was sung before he was born. Now he’s on a moon shot, too. Unlike that for war, Glover understands that a magnificent quest such as he is on is taxpayer money well-spent.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Orange County Register

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Larry Wilson: The magnificent return to the moon

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