We are all star children now

The Artemis II mission will end this afternoon when the craft splashes down off the coast of San Diego (or possibly Tijuana) this afternoon, delighting scientists, amateur astronomers, and star nerds alike. 

But once the Orion craft has come and gone, there will still be things to see and do in San Diego for enthusiasts of the final frontier, because this region truly is a place for space.

The connection between San Diego and the stars may seem unusual, but it’s been that way for millennia. The crystalline air of San Diego has long lent itself to observation of the night sky.

In fact, San Diego’s Kumeyaay people have centuries of sophisticated lore about the stars and planetary cycles, and even planned major celebrations around the waxing and waning cycles of Venus, or Kwellyap miwan.

Today, Venus still waxes and wanes over San Diego’s sea cliffs, and the observatories are still here — albeit in different forms. I was lucky enough to be able to meet with a group of geophysicists and space scientists yesterday at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to talk to them about today’s splashdown.

There’s no getting around it, through — you and everyone you love comes from the place in the photo the Artemis team sent back this week, this tiny blue and green marble surrounded by an atmosphere, so incredibly tiny and fragile from a distance, that spins in a sea of stars.

“For me,” Meena Wadhwa, director of the Scripps Institution and former lead scientist for NASA on the Mars Sample Return program, “I look at that image and see why we exist.” She meant we’re meant to explore, to learn, to see, to be curious.

After all, we are all star children now.

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