I was a Nasa medic in the space shuttle era. Artemis II’s voyage gives me hope for the future

After a successful launch last week, Artemis II is on its way. A tiny teardrop of a capsule, shared by four astronauts, floating weightless in a volume about the size of a minivan. They are hurtling now, across the ocean of space between Earth and the moon. Further and faster than any human has travelled for more than half a century.

I used to work as a doctor with the medical teams at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center, during the space shuttle era. Back then, on the day of a launch, they would sometimes take me along to stand with the emergency rescue crews so I could watch it go. It’s not something you forget in a hurry.

At lift-off you see the flash, watch the clouds billowing around the launch pad, and then the rocket leaps into the air. It’s all silent at this point. Happening more than two miles away. You’re as close as anyone is allowed to be (apart from the fire crew sitting closer, hunkered down inside an armoured patrol car for their protection).

The sound has yet to reach you. And then it does. Beating through your chest. So forceful it wants to move you around, and just when you think it’s reached its climax, it gets louder still. The thing you’re looking at is a lump weighing more than 2,000 metric tonnes, climbing straight up into the sky, moving faster than your brain tells you should be possible, and yet somehow it is still accelerating. The whole thing feels like a joyous assault on your senses.

But for those gathered who have been around long enough to know what this is, deep trepidation mixes with all of that. The pair of white solid rockets that flank the orange tank are alight for just over two minutes. They are packed with a dense putty of solid fuel that, once burning, cannot be stopped until all the fuel is gone. In 1986 it was a malfunction in this system that destroyed the space shuttle Challenger and killed its crew of seven, only 73 seconds into launch. It is why everyone who understands what they are looking at holds their breath until they see those spent solid rockets fall away.

After eight minutes of flight the main engines, powered by liquid hydrogen and oxygen, shut down. And on the ground Nasa’s teams breathe a quiet sigh of relief. That was how it felt for me when I watched the Artemis II launch last Wednesday night.

In the early hours of Friday morning here in the UK, Artemis fired its engines again, this time to take itself onward to the moon. A five-minute 55-second burn sped them to an outrageous 25,000 miles per hour, enough to break out of its orbit high above the Earth.

They are not the first to have trodden this path. In late December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Bill Anders and a rookie named James Lovell, became the first people to leave Earth orbit in what many describe as the gutsiest mission in the history of human space flight.

The Apollo 8 crew left behind a world in turmoil, and a country deeply divided. That year America had seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F  Kennedy. There were riots, civil rights marches against racism and racial segregation, and protests against the Vietnam war.

And yet Apollo 8 journeyed on. On Christmas Eve 1968, the crew swung around the far side of the moon, looking back at the Earth and seeing it, for the first time, as a fragile blue marble against the void of space, borderless and alone in the darkness. They would read aloud from the book of Genesis, and enjoy a dinner of thermostabilised turkey and cranberry sauce on Christmas Day.

I interviewed Lovell around the 50th anniversary of that flight. He told me that, while he was not a particularly religious man, those passages from the Old Testament, seemed fitting in the moment.

Lovell – like Artemis crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen – was a military test pilot, who had flown in combat. He was, on paper, a man of war. But he was, at heart, also an explorer and he saw his journey to the moon as a product of something more than the simmering nuclear standoff of the time.

When the Apollo 8 crew returned to Earth after six days in space, Nasa was deluged with letters and telegrams of celebration and congratulation. Among them was one that simply read: “Thank you, for saving 1968.”

Artemis is now on that same track. Following in Apollo 8’s footsteps. But the Artemis crew are pioneers nonetheless, sailing aboard a new ship. In Glover, Christina Koch and Hansen you have the first black American, the first woman and the first Canadian to fly to the moon; all under the able leadership of former US navy fighter pilot Wiseman.

There is a long tradition and great symbolism in the naming of these voyaging spacecraft. When Lovell returned to the moon in 1970 as commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13, he called his command module “Odyssey”, underlining the spirit of his endeavour.

The Artemis crew have named their spacecraft “Integrity”. In the minutes before lift-off last Wednesday, when the launch control director announced that Artemis was finally “Go for launch”, the crew replied: “We are going for our families. We are going for our teammates. We are going for all humanity.” And against the background of that violent launch and the destructive capacity of the rocket on which they rode, in this there is – perhaps – a glimmer of hope, of a brighter and better future, in which there might be a place for everyone.

Kevin Fong is a doctor, broadcaster and presenter of the podcast “16 Sunsets”, which tells the story of Nasa’s first space shuttle mission

Photograph courtesy of Kevin Fong