NASA’s Artemis II is scheduled to splashdown on Friday in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of San Diego. By the time its 10-day journey around the moon is complete, crew members are expected to have flown more than 685,000 miles.

Calculated in Southwest Rapid Rewards points, the four astronauts will have each earned somewhere between twenty and fifty one-way, “Wanna Get Away” free flights. If any of the airlines’ public relations representatives are reading, they’d be wise to extend this special benefit to astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Jeremy Hansen.

Not only would it be a patriotic goodwill gesture, but passengers would feel even safer knowing there were pilots on board who had navigated a 30-foot-high spacecraft traveling at 25,000 miles per hour on a journey to the moon.

Last week’s launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida elicited both nostalgic and inspirational vibes. The sight of hundreds of thousands of spectators gazing upwards from the beaches and millions more tuned in as both network and cable television covered the historic event confirmed the significance of the evening. I was only seven months old back in 1972 when NASA’s Apollo 17 made its final journey to the moon, but my father left behind local newspapers from Apollo 11 in 1969. As a child, I amassed a scrapbook of clippings from Space Shuttle flights.

Space exploration has long fascinated many. The countless unknowns, coupled with the vastness of the cosmos, leave us shaking our heads in wonder, which is a very good thing. One of the worst things that can happen to a person is to think they know and understand everything. I feel bad for people who wake up each day with no desire to go anywhere or learn anything new. That’s a formula for misery.

Learning and exploring are like compound interest, which has been described as the 8th wonder of the world. There’s a dramatic and accelerating benefit to reading and discovery. The more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know. John F. Kennedy, delivering his “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in 1962, was right when he observed, “The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.”

The United States will spend over $27 billion on space exploration this year. That’s a lot of money, but consider that Americans will spend more than $117 billion on beer alone in 2026. No offense to the brewing industry, but dollars doled out on space discovery will get humanity a lot farther than money exchanged for suds. Since the dawn of the Space Age in 1957, lots of innovations utilized here on earth can be attributed to the explorations of the heavens, including CAT scanners, portable computers, LEDs – even ear thermometers and memory foam.

The ambition that’s sending America back to the moon is the same spirit of aspiration that can motivate each of us to pursue our own “moonshot” – that seemingly impossible dream or goal still beyond reach. That’s just one of the subtle yet profound benefits of achievement. One man’s accomplishment can sow seeds by motivating others to take a good, though intimidating, risk.

What is it that you’ve been wanting to do? Go back to college? Get married and start a family? Buy a house? Start a business? Lose the weight, stop smoking? Write a book? Travel the world? If men and women can make it to the moon and back, surely you can try.

Speaking at Rice University, President Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon … and pursue other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” When we do hard things, good things usually follow. As Julie and I regularly stress with our three sons: Easy now equals hard later, while hard now equals easy later. Moonshots require dreaming big but also demand hard work.

It’s estimated Norman Rockwell created over 4,000 paintings and illustrations throughout his 60-plus-year career. One of my favorites features the front of a church on a busy city street full of people hurriedly passing by, their eyes downcast. A worker on a ladder is affixing the week’s sermon title on a signboard between the doors. It’s from Psalm 121 and reads, “LIFT UP THINE EYES.”

As we prayerfully await the return of the Artemis II crew, we’d be wise to do likewise – literally and metaphorically. Look up and get going. You have one life. Take your moonshot.

Paul J. Batura is a local writer and founder of the 4:8 Media Network. He can be reached via email Paul@PaulBatura.com or on X @PaulBatura.