We are going to the Moon. This time, to stay

_____________________________________ 

My very first day of college, I wrote a letter to my future self, sealed away in an envelope and only to be read again in four years when it came time for me to graduate. It wasn't my idea, it's actually a tradition of the Business Honors Program at UT Austin, so all my classmates did the exact same thing. I thought it was pretty goofy at the time, and I certainly didn't dwell on it much during my four years of undergrad. But graduation came along in the blink of an eye, and when I held that envelope in my hand again, I realized I'd completely forgotten what I'd written four years ago! I figured it was probably super cringeworthy - who knows what kind of crap 18-year-old Hans jotted down?! Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised. Naive as I may have been, my younger self had some nice words of wisdom

This article will be a similar time capsule for me, because it captures a moment of euphoric exhilaration that I desperately wish to preserve. I knew SpaceX was in the running for the Artemis Human Landing System contract, and I knew NASA was going to make the announcement soon, but somehow the news still hit me out of the blue. There I was, sitting at my desk Friday morning when I overheard one of the other Finance managers:

"We just won it! We won it all! Starship is going the Moon!!"  

Word spread quickly, by lunchtime it was trending all over social media. By the time NASA made the official announcement that afternoon, even my mom had heard the news! And when Kathy Leuders, NASA's head of human spaceflight, declared that SpaceX had been selected, everyone around me started applauding and cheering! 

Like every other space fan alive today, I was inspired by the Apollo moon landings. I spent my entire childhood drawing outlandish crayon rocket ships, hoping that one day, I might live to witness one of my crazy vehicles touch down on that silvery wafer in the night sky. But of course, even by the time I was born in 1996, the last footprints on the moon had already been left untouched for 24 years. The sad, simple truth is that those legendary moon landings, the foundation of my career and my calling, well... they were never really mine to begin with. And unless you're at least in your 50s, they aren't yours to claim either. The moon landings were the achievements of our parents and grandparents; for my generation, a generation confined to Low Earth Orbit, all they are is an unfulfilled legacy, images and videos of a bygone era when humanity was briefly a species of two worlds

As kids, we don't think much of our parents' careers. Children go to school and adults go to work, that's just the way it is. Only now, having myself been in the workforce for a little while, have I come to appreciate what a profound statement it is for someone to say they've dedicated their entire life to a cause they believed in. It's been only three years since I graduated college; I've spent a year and a half on Wall Street, almost a year and a half at SpaceX, and already I catch myself dreaming about how wonderful retirement must be, or what I wouldn't give to at least have an extra week of vacation per year. But then I remember that my dad has been going into the same office in the San Antonio Medical Center, treating patients day in and day out for the past 25 years (and that's after an entire decade of medical training!), with no plans to quit anytime soon, and suddenly I feel silly for ever having complained. Three decades from now, I wonder if my future kids will say the same thing about me. "My dad is crazy - he's spent the last thirty years going into the same office, sitting at the same desk, building Excel spreadsheets, answering tedious phone calls, sending countless emails, all because he wanted a lunar landing that he could claim as his own. A lifetime of work, just so someone else could put a flag on Mars"