My cousin Marge visited last week from Cincinnati and asked why I care so much about the space program. She said it politely, but the implication was: it’s not your life, it’s not your job, why do you follow it like it’s your religion?

I tried to explain. This is approximately what I said.

I was 32 years old when Sputnik launched. I was an insurance adjuster in Ohio. I had no special connection to engineering or the military or aerospace. The space race arrived in my life through radio and newspaper and I didn’t choose to be interested — it just was. The beep from that satellite lodged in my mind like a splinter and it hasn’t come loose in twelve years.

What is it, exactly, about this that’s held me?

Part of it is the scale. The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old and approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter, containing somewhere between 100 billion and one trillion galaxies each containing similar numbers of stars. Against this, a human life on a particular planet is almost incomprehensibly small. And yet here we are, these small things, building machines to go to the Moon. The disproportion between what we are and what we’re attempting is dizzying.

Part of it is the problem-solving. I’m not an engineer but I love watching engineering problems get solved. The F-1 combustion instability, the heat shield design, the guidance computer software, the EVA suit flexibility — these are hard problems with real solutions that smart people found through systematic work. I follow these problems the way other people follow mystery novels: I want to know how it comes out.

Part of it is the people. I’ve written about the Mercury Seven and the Gemini crews and the Apollo astronauts, but also about the flight controllers and the engineers and the technicians. These are remarkable human beings doing their best work in difficult conditions. I’m proud of them in the way you’re proud of someone you don’t know personally but whose existence makes the world feel better.

And part of it is simpler than all of that. I want to know what it looks like from out there. I want to know what it looks like to see the Earth from the Moon. I’ve wanted that since 1957 and in about seven weeks I’m going to find out.

Marge nodded and said she supposed that made sense.

Seven weeks.