Not Your Grandfather’s Moon Mission
NASA has picked the four astronauts who will fly to the moon next year—and this lineup looks different than the Apollo crews did.
If you asked Americans to name a space mission, any space mission, I suspect very few would pick Apollo 8. The 1968 mission, the first to circle the moon, gets overshadowed by Apollo 11 (“One small step for man”; you know the rest) and Apollo 13 (of ). The astronauts didn’t venture from their spaceship, nor did they touch the lunar surface. But in its own, quiet way, that mission was an existential milestone. Until that moment, with a few exceptions to low-Earth orbit, human beings carried out their existence on this planet. They inhabited “a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” as Carl Sagan , just a “mote of dust suspended in
