Serve by Design

It has been an exciting month for space enthusiasts! (Moi included!). The Artemis 1 unmanned moon mission concluded on Sunday, December 11 with re-entry of the Orion space capsule and its splashdown and recovery after more than three-weeks. The mission, to and from, including a wide-swooping loop around the moon after 1.4 million miles, was epic. The images taken by the spacecraft cameras have been breathtaking and vivid! Borrowing an exclamation from the Star Trek television series, this mission into deep space (like the fictional Starship Enterprise) promises to take us in the future to distances beyond the moon “where no man has gone before!” "When I consider Your heavens...the moon and the stars... What is man that You are mindful  of him... that You visit him?" (Ps. 8:3-4). (Photo Credit: NASA) The 25,000-mph re-entry into earth’s atmosphere exposed Orion’s newly advanced heatshield to temperatures of more than 5000 degrees Fahrenheit. This shield had never been tested ...

We were there! Well, not really, but we excitedly followed the news source coverage of the Artemis 1 launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this week! This launch represents a major step in NASA’s return to the Moon. The Artemis 1 Mission occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning and was launched toward lunar orbit with the expansive Orion capsule as its payload. This twenty-six-day test run (without astronauts) was propelled to its destination by the most powerful rocket in NASA’s arsenal to-date! The launch exploded from the pad with a whopping force of 9 million pounds of thrust! A look back to the future! The Keppler’s made a return visit (our third!) to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, August 2016, when the idea of a Mars mission was beginning to gain traction. During that occasion, we had our picture taken next to a prototype of the bulbous, gum-drop shaped Orion spacecraft. This four-passenger spaceship is being designed to transport astronauts to the Moon and later, to...