Notes from Maine - 2026/04/05
Happy Easter if you celebrate! At my house, we’ll be spending the day mostly indoors. It’s raining again and the mud outside could swallow a person alive. I will still get my steps in—I need to carry a bunch of stuff up to the attic, and spend some down in the cellar.
My brother and sister-in-law came down this week. We had takeout while we watched slides that my grandfather took in the 1950s and 60s. My grandfather’s slide projector was horrible. It was the kind where you load a block of slides into a magazine and then chunk them in and out with an arm while the bulb heats up to the temperature of fresh lava.
Years ago, my brother started watching his local dump’s “free store” for projectors and carousels. He brought big boxes of parts down to me. Mom took the projectors apart and I 3D printed replacements for the broken parts. Now we have a “working” Kodak projector, but only three carousels that fit it. I reloaded two of those with a bunch of photos we had never seen before.
We saw my grandparents (or at least my grandmother) in Panama, Maine, Virginia, California, Japan, and parts unknown. Labeling wasn’t my grandfather’s strong suit. We didn’t get any slides from Greenland this time. I think we’ve already seen all of those.
“That’s Aunt Carol,” my brother said, pointing.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “but that lady is Aunt Carol now. Who’s gonna prove me wrong?”
He had a fair point. This time I’m pretty sure we didn’t see a single photo of anyone still alive. In the slides I unloaded we have pictures of our Texas kin, but they didn’t make the rotation this time so there was nobody to dispute any claim that my brother made.
The other big news of the week in this house was the launch of Artemis II. I was alive when people first set foot on the moon, but this is the first mission around the moon that I have witnessed in my adult life and I found the launch captivating and nerve-wracking to watch. Everything needs to go perfectly or I think the public support of these missions will evaporate. It’s already so low. This mission is historic in so many ways. I was shocked how many people were learning about it on the day of the launch, or even afterwards. I have a sinking feeling that without public backing, the future missions will be delayed or even cancelled.
Dozens and dozens of advancements to science, medicine, and technology sprang from the original Apollo missions. We don’t need to justify these Artemis missions in terms of return on investment—the achievement alone is reward enough—but I think they would prove worthy even under that light.
Tomorrow the crew will pass behind the moon and we’ll lose communication with the astronauts for half an hour. They will see parts of the moon that earlier missions didn’t catch a glimpse of. Every part of the moon has been photographed (by different orbiters) but it’s still fun that they’ll be the first people to see some of it in person.
My sister said, “Mapping DNA,” when I asked her what she thought the biggest scientific achievement of our lifetime was.
I shrugged. Yeah, I guess that’s true. I had just proposed that space exploration was the biggest scientific achievement of our lifetimes, but she has a point. Google, and apparently a TON of people, agree with her. For me, it will always be space exploration. What a dumb, fantastic thing to do. All these Space Shuttle and ISS missions were fine, but getting out beyond the moon is thrilling.
The idea of space reminds me of snorkeling off the coast of Cozumel. Where we stayed there wasn’t a beach to speak of. You entered the ocean through a gap in the rocky wall and the ocean was just visible, far below. There was a strong current pulling you south, so you had to keep an eye on the wall to make sure you could keep track of where you were.
Behind you, the floor of the ocean dropped off sharply and there was nothing but deep, deep, open water. Anything could have lived in that vast space. If you swam too far from shore the current was even stronger and the temperature of the water dropped sharply. To me, it felt like being at the edge of deep space. Turning around to look at the island, I could see all of civilization. Behind me was only emptiness. I think that’s how the astronauts must feel when they look back towards Earth and they can only make out a bright dot that contains everyone and everything they’ve ever known.
The fear of deep water is called Thalassophobia. The fear of outer space is Astrophobia. I’m not “afraid” of either, but they definitely give me a nice chill. I will be waiting with fingers crossed until Reid Wiseman (Commander), Victor Glover (Pilot), Christina Hammock Koch (Mission Specialist), and Jeremy Hansen (Mission Specialist) return home, and then waiting eagerly for the next mission.
