How My Journey Began: Artemis II, Apollo, and the Moon Landing
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that my whole journey started with a moon mission.
I was five years old when my teacher rolled a television into our kindergarten classroom. I remember the way my teacher hushed the whole room without even asking. I didn't fully understand what I was watching (the Apollo 11 capsule splashing down into the Pacific Ocean) but I understood that whatever this was, it mattered. You could feel it in the room.
When you experience a moment like that, you don't need to grasp the science or the politics or the history to know you're watching something real. Something human. Something that took everything a country had and pointed it at the sky.
A few years later, my family let me stay up past 9:30 on a school night. That alone told me something important was happening again. We watched the Apollo 17 launch in the dark on TV (the last crewed mission to the Moon) and I can still picture it. The rocket turned night into day. The light from that launch bled across the Florida sky, and I sat there, eight years old, feeling something I didn't have a word for yet. Pride, maybe. Wonder. The sense that we, as a country, as a species, were capable of extraordinary things.
These moments stuck with me. It sparked my fascination with space and led to my studying physics and astronomy. The space race was the origin of my intellectual curiosity and as I reflect now it amazes me that my career all started with watching a moon mission.
The country felt different then. There was a kind of collective "can do" energy that I absorbed as a kid, even if I didn't have the context to fully understand what was happening around it. And there was a lot happening. The civil rights movement was forcing a reckoning that was long overdue. The Vietnam War was exposing the cost of propaganda and the way truth can be manipulated. The divisions were real and they were deep.
But there was also this shared, genuine pride. Progress and imperfection living side by side. We weren't perfect. But we were trying. We were building something.
Which is why it stops me cold when I hear people say the Moon landing was faked.
I don't say that with contempt. I say it with genuine sadness. What that belief misses isn't just the facts, it diminishes the weight of what we actually accomplished.
The Apollo program was hard in ways that are almost impossible to convey today. Three astronauts died in a ground test of Apollo 1 (I have a vague but sobering memory of that news). Apollo 13 came within a breath of killing three more. The on-board computer in the lunar module had roughly the processing power of a modern handheld calculator. But, unlike computers today, it was purpose-built to do specific tasks, and that precision was its genius. Its simplicity was its strength.
More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program. Engineers, scientists, seamstresses, welders, mathematicians doing calculations by hand. It took an entire nation's worth of expertise and labor and it was still almost impossible. These hardships are not evidence of fabrication, they are the very reason it's one of the greatest achievements in human history.
So, what changed? Why do a meaningful number of people today believe we never went to the moon? I've thought about this a lot. And I think the answer is the information environment we've built.
When I was a kid, information traveled through a small number of channels. Television. Newspapers. The evening news. There were editors, fact-checkers, and broadcast standards. Misinformation existed. Propaganda existed. Vietnam proved that. But it moved slowly, through centralized pipes, and it had friction.
Today, everyone has a global platform with no guard rails. It has become incredibly hard to tell the difference between expertise earned over a lifetime and baseless confidence or an agenda dressed up in the language of expertise.
The result is that we've lost something more fundamental than facts. We've lost a shared method for figuring out what's real. We no longer agree on how to evaluate reality, let alone what reality is. This is the true information crisis.
This month, we went back to the Moon. Artemis II (a crewed mission that took humans farther from Earth than any person has traveled since Apollo 13) is a genuine marvel. It deserves the same awe I felt as an eight-year-old watching night turn to day over Florida. It is still hard. The risks are still real. The people working on it are still extraordinary.
Since the launch, I have found myself sitting with a question that I cannot yet answer: will we let it matter?
If we couldn't agree on Apollo, something that happened in front of cameras and witnesses and hundreds of thousands of participants, something with a 50-year paper trail, what does that mean for Artemis? Will these missions inspire a new generation the way Apollo inspired me? Or will they get swallowed by suspicion before the capsule even splashes down?
I was there. I watched Apollo 11 return. I watched the Apollo 17 launch. These aren't abstract historical events to me. They are personal memories, embedded in who I am. And I won't pretend that makes me the authority on what's true. But it does make me someone who understands what we stand to lose if we can't find our way back to shared ground.
The answer isn't censorship. I believe deeply in free expression. People deserve to make up their own minds, with access to real evidence. The answer isn't some authority deciding what's true and feeding it to the rest of us. That would just be a different kind of problem.
What we need is a credibility layer.
A way for people to see, clearly and transparently, which claims are supported by verifiable evidence across multiple independent sources. A way to understand the difference between a credible expert and a persuasive voice. A way to ask the question "is this real?" without having to spend three hours doing research most people don't have time to do.
I have seen what we're capable of when we're at our best. I saw it flicker across a classroom TV when I was five. I saw it light up the night sky when I was eight. Inspired by these events, I spent my early career among people who were trying to understand the universe, and I saw that even then, the most important thing wasn't the data itself. It was the commitment to following it wherever it led.
We've done incredible things before. We are doing incredible things right now. But we can only be proud of them together if we can agree on the reality we're building from. That's not a small ask in 2026. But I don't think it's impossible either. What we choose to believe still matters.
