I remember resenting the moon a little back in 1969. Because of the moon, my parents had cancelled our trip to ride the paddleboats at City Park in Denver to watch the multicolored fountains in the middle of the lake spray their night rainbows into the sky.

For a 9-year-old, nothing much beat those fountains. But my history-minded parents wanted all us six kids to gather around the black-and-white TV instead and watch the Americans land on the moon.

Of course, when that spindly, foil-wrapped contraption landed in the Sea of Tranquility, we kids were utterly gobsmacked. I’m not sure there’s been anything quite like that moment since.

I still vividly remember when the Eagle touched down, broadcaster Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” exclaimed “Oh boy!” and then turned to astronaut Wally Schirra, who was with him on the set, and said, “Wally, say something — I’m speechless.”

We rushed outside right after that giant first leap by Neil Armstrong to see if we could somehow see those astronauts on the moon up there. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, those fountains were forgot and the man on the moon became the childhood moment we would never ever forget.

Cronkite was more composed and eloquent in his signoff that day, capturing everything that the moon landing meant for a country even more torn apart than it is now by race riots, the Vietnam War and assassinations of its leaders.

“In these eight days of the Apollo 11 mission, the world was witness to not only the triumph of technology, but to the strength of man’s resolve and the persistence of his imagination … The date’s now indelible. It’s going to be remembered as long as man survives – July 20, 1969 – the day a man reached and walked on the moon. The least of us is improved by the things done by the best of us. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins are the best of us, and they’ve led us further and higher than we ever imagined we were likely to go.”

The next day at St. John’s Catholic Grade School, every single boy on the playground had decided independently that he was going to be an astronaut when he grew up. My brother and I started assembling moon modules out of aluminum foil at night and landing them on the living room carpet. The world had changed for us children in one day, and the skies literally opened up with an infinity of possibilities.

An estimated 600 million people worldwide watched that broadcast — at the time the largest television audience in history. For a few days, the divisions over Vietnam, race and culture receded as that moonshot unified the entire world.

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins forever lifted my generation’s sights up to the heavens that day, showing us we could do anything we wanted to if we just put our minds to it, and I’m not sure my generation has looked down since.

So here we go again. At another time when the country seems hopelessly convulsed with division, a controversial war, and violence and protest in our streets, can Artemis do what Apollo did for us 50 years ago again? Will the world be as transfixed this time? Can Artemis make us all look up together again?

Many, many folks alive today weren’t alive to see that first moonshot, so the repeat feat may very well seem every bit as astonishing.

The Artemis II capsule is racing for the moon as we speak, after that magnificent blastoff on Wednesday. It’s a dress rehearsal for an actual moon landing in the next year or so, which will put a woman and a person of color on the moon for the very first time.

In a moment when institutions are being questioned again and authority is under siege, can NASA stand as proof that American ingenuity and collective effort can still accomplish the extraordinary? Can Artemis be a reminder that our country is still capable of greatness?

There’s a lot of inspiration to find in this return.

This rocket took thousands of scientists and engineers from 12 different countries a decade to build.

Taller than the Statue of Liberty, it is the most powerful rocket ever built. It took a building the size of 31 football fields just to assemble it.

Artemis II is a crucial first chapter of an ambitious and risky program to eventually return people to the lunar surface, build a base there and use it as a stepping stone to push deeper into the solar system than ever.

Astronauts will be heading to the south pole to poke around in the moon’s permanent shadows for patches of water this time around, water that would make a permanent base sustainable.

With the Chinese right on our heels, it could mark the reopening of a new space race and a new era of deep space exploration, this time involving a host of commercial space companies like Blue Origin and Space X, which are building the landers for Artemis.

And this public-private space partnership is very much a Colorado affair. More than 250 Colorado companies contributed to Artemis, including Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County, which built the Orion spacecraft carrying the capsule to the moon and back. United Launch Alliance in Centennial in partnership with Boeing built the the second stage of the launch system positioned above the core stage.  

There are 26 companies directly tied to Artemis in Colorado Springs alone.

The lift the first moon landing gave our country didn’t last — the fall of Saigon, Watergate, and the oil crisis of the ’70s lay ahead — but in that summer moment, the moon landing gave a fractured nation something it could, briefly, celebrate together.

It’s worth remembering as we reach for the stars once again that the moon was once part of Earth, the eighth continent some call it. It’s been 4.5 billion years since a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia collided with the early Earth, an impact so powerful it vaporized and ejected enormous amounts of the planet into orbit, which eventually coalesced, with gravity’s help, into the Moon.

 So now four new explorers are about to reunite us with that missing piece once again — is it too much to ask that, for another brief, shining moment, they might also reunite all of us looking on and up as well?

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of  The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.