A Story of Space and Connection

Artemis II is making its way around the moon this week. This marks our return there for the first time in decades. I found myself thinking about space again.

Not the mission details or the trajectory, but the idea of it.

The distance. The silence. The way something can feel so far away yet still hold meaning. And for obvious reasons, it brought me back to her.

Our Space Connection

She loved space, not casually, but in a way that felt intentional. Like looking up wasn’t just something you do. It is something you try to understand. And it says something about how you see the world.

Her last name in English translates in Sanskrit to Sky Walker. That always stayed with me. Mainly because there’s also a Star Wars character named Ric Olié—a pilot. We both love the franchise.

It was one of those little things you don’t plan for, but you notice along the way.

Sky Walker and a pilot. And somewhere in all of that, there was something else we shared.

Sharing The Same Solar System

We had participated in previous space flights. Her aboard the Stardust Spacecraft that orbited the Sun. While I am aboard the Perseverance rover running around on Mars. Our names in each vehicle’s microchips.

Years before Artemis‘ launch, NASA gave us the opportunity to send our names into space again. These names would be in the ships microchips as well. And now they’re being carried farther than we’d ever go ourselves. I told her I had submitted mine. She added hers too.

Now we’re up there together. Her name. My name hurdling towards the Moon. Unforgettable.

It wasn’t something we planned down to the details. But it was something we chose. In that moment, we both agreed to the same idea. We didn’t really know what it would come to mean to this writer. But it wouldn’t have changed a thing if I had known we’d be apart.

Our Space Bar and Grill

We talked about space from time to time and somewhere in those conversations, an idea came up. Just as a joke of course, we would be the first to open a space bar and grill.

Not here. Not anywhere ordinary.

Up there.

And our first date wasn’t going to be dinner somewhere local. It was going to be in space itself.

A table set in orbit with no noise. nor past and no gravity pulling us back. Just two people sitting across from each other, finally in a place where nothing else would ever match.

But like a lot of things between us… it didn’t stay that way.

We never took that flight, for obvious reasons as life keeps us grounded. Everything got complicated and for whatever reason we didn’t get that version of ourselves in this lifetime.

Grounded

It’s strange the things that stay with you.

Not the plans you made, and not always the moments that actually happened. Sometimes it’s the ones that didn’t. The ones that existed somewhere between a conversation, a possibility and a dream.

Artemis II is now somewhere between the Earth and the Moon.. Our names are aboard it. I keep thinking about the world’s relentless pursuit of space. We are pushing further into a realm that has always felt just out of reach.

And for a brief time, we had something like that too.

Something distant, but real. Something that felt like it belonged together—somewhere quieter, simpler, untouched by everything that eventually pulled it apart.

Maybe some things were never meant to happen here.

But that doesn’t make them any less real for the time they existed.

Maybe we did make it there. Just not in the way we imagined.

And if there’s a version of life where that flight happened, I’d like to think we made it there. In that version, where that table is still set somewhere above everything.

If you’ve been here before, you already know…

3:16 was never just a moment.

It is a series of them.

Some that happened.
Some that didn’t.

And some that never really left.

For more on the 3:16 Series read the stories below.

What COVID Changed in Me (3:16 Series)

The Weight of The Love That Stayed (3:16 Series)

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