Artemis 2 is coming down this evening (local time) into the Pacific Ocean. I watched it take off ten days ago, watched it live as the countdown began, watched the launch abort system pull away, saw all those gases explode at around 5 of the countdown, and then the rocket carrying the Orion capsule shot up. Instantly I was transported back to those first takeoffs in the 1960s.

They were all American launches because, while the Russians preceded them, those launches were done in secret. So there was Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961, followed by John Glenn’s orbital flight in 1962.

Philosopher and writer Iris Murdoch wrote: “Science today is more likely to make us anxious than to make us proud, not only because we are now able to blow up our planet, but because, oddly enough, space travel does not make us feel like gods.”

Bernie, an aeronautical engineer who worked on unmanned flights to Mars before taking off into the more interior realms of Zen, would shake his head as he told me how dangerous those early flights were. “Your phone has more electronic power than we had back then,” he said. “They had almost no control over those things.”

“So why did they do them?” I asked.

“To beat the Russians.”

Unless you’re Elon Musk planning to mine Mars for minerals or to start a Martian colony for human escapees from Earth, most people feel overwhelmed just looking at the night sky, forget being on a spaceship and looking out at that vast darkness we know so little about. We don’t feel like gods. Only the narrowest, most arrogant human mind—or the various Captains Kirk on Star Trek—could look at all that space, with its billions of gaseous bodies, and think of us as conquerors.

But I, and so many others, loved the adventure of it. That’s why the Americans, with their Madison Avenue smarts, figured it was worth showing the whole shebang because the risks were what made the drama.

It’s ironic that I saw the 1968 landing on the moon at the Kennedy Airport in New York City and thought that that was the greatest adventure I’d ever seen, even as a far greater challenge was being met right in front of my eyes.

A good friend, a schoolmate from the religious Jewish school we had both attended, asked me to take her to the airport to be on hand to welcome her boyfriend back to the US and then take them uptown. She was a Jewish woman and the boyfriend was Palestinian, returning from Ramallah where he had gone to visit his family.

Craziest thing I ever heard, I thought to myself one year after the 1967 war, which brought the West Bank under the aegis of Israel. A Muslim and a Jew—is she out of her mind? She was a Barnard student, he was Columbia, and I pictured her mother’s face if she had known of this. Then I pictured the faces of our other friends and former classmates.

My imagination was so impoverished at the time that, while I could imagine a moon walk, I couldn’t imagine love between an Arab and a Jew. I comfort myself with the notion that she must have sensed something unconventional about me because she asked me for help and no one else.

At the terminal, she went downstairs to await him by the Customs door while I remained on the mezzanine, watching Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon on an immense screen dropped some three stories down from the ceiling high above us. It was being shown on TV so naturally, in that pre-AI age, I knew it wasn’t fake news. I gave it more credence than I did to what was happening right before my eyes down below.

She introduced me briefly, then both sat together in the back seat of the car as I drove them up to Columbia. Ordinarily, that would have been a long ride but not that evening; the Manhattan streets were deserted, probably because everyone was home watching TV. I think it was my very first time driving in the city itself and I still remember how the traffic lights all turned green as we sped up Broadway. They were whispering to each other and didn’t talk to me at all.

Reaching out across that divide, loving each other, felt far riskier than what was shown on screen. And even as our technology has vastly improved, to the betterment of safety for the astronauts, I wish our faith in humans’ potential and better nature improved equally. Of course, nowadays there are some, if not many, examples of Jews and Muslims sharing a life together (alas, not my friend and her Palestinian lover back then).

Our evolution has conditioned us to be wary of anyone who looks, speaks, or acts differently from us. This has been accompanied by thousands of years of battles, genocides, enslavement and persecution that reinforce that old conditioning. That person is not like us, not our tribe, don’t trust them. Don’t like them. And certainly, don’t love them.

But the expanding work of love takes us wider and wider. For me, bridging divides continues to be the great adventure. Following the beck and call of love across differences continues to be the main adventure. One small step for individual men and women create one great leap for all humankind.