Wonder Is the One Frequency That Requires No Translation

My car sped down the hill, my eyes darting from the speedometer to the road as I debated how much I could get away with.  Over the car speakers, NASA flight control officers worked their way through the launch sequence.  Artemis II was minutes away from making history, and I was running behind.

I’ve always been jealous that I didn’t get to see the Apollo missions live.  Ever since I heard the initial announcements of the Artemis program, I prayed I’d have my equivalent experience.  And thanks to years of delays, a new opportunity arose—my son could join me, too.  My son who was currently at home, while I was having to stop to let a pair of cadets saunter across a crosswalk as though they weren’t an obstacle disrupting a relationship-defining father-son bonding moment.

It’s roughly four minutes from the gate leaving base to my garage, but the announcer hit the one-minute mark right as I crossed through.  I debated flipping over to sport mode and gunning for it, but I knew I’d still fail to make it back in time. 

I clenched my jaw, then pulled over.  The livestream was already going on my phone, so I propped it up on the steering wheel and watched as the countdown I had dreamed and fantasized about so often in my younger days happened in real time. 

3…2…1…Liftoff.

1,700 miles away and right in front of me, the rocket started its journey to take humanity back to the moon in person for the first time in fifty-four years.  I sat on the side of a road I’d driven a thousand times, and the hair on my arms rose for a rocket lifting off a smudged six-inch screen.  It was almost everything I dreamed it would be.

A few minutes after the cameras lost sight of Artemis II, I pulled into the garage and headed inside.  My wife and two kids were in the kitchen and as I dropped my bags, I asked my son if he wanted to see the astronauts go to space.  He sprinted over—no hesitation in his stride, no three-year-old hostage negotiation tactics.

So it was there in my kitchen, me on a knee still in my Space Force uniform and my son bouncing on his toes next to me where we watched the launch together—not live, unfortunately, but the next best thing.

His face lit up in a way that only a young child’s can.  He smiled with pure joy, his expression enchanted.  One of his small hands held onto my arm to steady him as he leaned as far forward towards my phone as he could, his other outstretched with a finger following the rocket’s path on the little screen.  The whole time he kept up a litany of questions: Where are the astronauts?  Where are they going?  Is that a rocket?  Are there astronauts on there?  Are they going to the moon?  Why did those rockets fall off? 

I rattled off answers, watching him more than the video.  The rocket captured me on the side of the road.  His enthusiasm captured me now. 

After it finished, he asked to watch it again.  And then again, after that.  None of the repeats diminished the experience for him.  Each rewatch, the smile came right back on his face—one mirrored on my own.

Thinking back on the experience with the space of a few days, I appreciate it even more.  A three-year-old and his father share almost no common language—different vocabularies, attention spans, understandings of appropriate speaking volume while indoors.  There are days that gap feels like a canyon, and I’m yelling across it hoping my voice carries.

And then, a rocket leaves the atmosphere. 

The gap disappears and none of that matters; we’re the same age, pointing at the same thing.

We don’t build enough things worth being collectively awestruck by anymore.  We manufacture outrage at scale; wonder, we leave to chance.

Artemis II is the rare exception, something that worked on a three-year-old and his father equally, simultaneously, without explanation.  The canyon between us disappeared.  And for a second, I could see forward across it—past the three-year-old on my kitchen floor, to who he could become.

Later that evening, my son kept asking questions about the astronauts.  Hints of that smile from earlier played at the edges of his mouth as I tried to explain orbital mechanics to a kid who routinely still walks into doors.  It didn’t matter that it was going over his head.  It wasn’t about the mathematics.  It never was.

Wonder is the one frequency that requires no translation.