Me, excited? I’m over the moon

RMY LATE father, a journalist to his fingertips, had almost uncanny instincts where breaking news stories were concerned. On the night of July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, he snorted in disbelief when Nasa announced that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would now grab a few hours of sleep before venturing outside. It was late at night in the UK and my mother and I, and I’m sure millions more, gratefully prepared to grab a bit of shut-eye ourselves before the big moment.

Dad was scornful. “Sleep? SLEEP? Those guys’ll be far too excited to sleep! I’m staying up with the TV on. I guarantee they’ll insist on starting the moonwalk early. I’ll wake you when they do.”

He was right.A couple of hours (and, rumour has it, a couple of Benzedrine pills) later,Armstrong was half-stepping, half-floating, down onto the Sea of Tranquility and a new chapter in the human story had begun.

Which is how many of us felt just after 6.45 onWednesday morning when Artemis 1, the most powerful rocket ever built, blasted off with majestic splendour from its Florida launchpad.

Susanna Reid and I were on GMB in the middle of interviewing British astronaut Tim Peake about the first mission to the Moon in half a century when producers yelled at us through our earpieces: “It’s going!” and we cut to awesome live pictures of the monster rocket’s engines igniting, flaring, and burning white-hot as they pushed the giant steadily skywards.

As it barrelled away, Peake was unambiguous about what the watching world was witnessing: the beginning of the true colonisation of space.Apollo astronauts could only spend a few hours loitering on the Moon.TheArtemis programme will, very soon, lead to permanent settlements there.Today’s spacemen and women will be able to live for months on our nearest neighbour. But why? To what purpose?

So man can one day live on Mars. Peake said he thinks that will happen well within three decades from now.

Just as Artemis 1 is a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming Moon landings, so they will in turn be dummy runs for the main feature: settling the Red Planet.And why is that important?

Because it is in mankind’s DNA to explore and colonise. Even so-called indigenous populations such as native Americans were once arriviste newcomers. Apaches, Sioux, Iroquois – tribes descended from nomadic hunters out of northeast Asia who migrated over the Bering Strait land bridge during the last Ice Age as relatively recently as 12,000 years ago.

We restless humans have never stopped pushing out and away. Now we can add a third direction – “up”. Science has added a new dimension to our thirst to discover and settle new territories.The Moon will soon be the latest, and then it will be the turn of Mars.

Am I excited at the prospect? You bet I am. This is living history.