J.J. Goodman: Writings, Musings and More

  Image: NASA I don’t think I even realized I was holding my breath until I exhaled loudly, tears involuntarily forming in my eyes, when we finally heard Reid Wiseman’s voice acknowledging Mission Control following the communication blackout during reentry. Within minutes thereafter, the Orion spacecraft Integrity deployed its main parachutes and splashed down perfectly in the Pacific Ocean to bring the Artemis II mission to the Moon to a close. It was indeed a cathartic moment for those of us Gen-Xers who’d in many ways unknowingly harbored Challenger trauma all these long years. The mission brought not only Gen-X, but millions of others, senses of peace, joy, happiness, and hope for the future we’d not felt in some time. Now that our “emotional support astronauts” Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have returned home, we’re faced with a new question: What now?   Well, if you’re a space nerd like me and on the Threads social media platform, t...

  Image: NASA Pick a cliché about Gen-X; it doesn’t matter which. Drinking from the hose. Staying out until the lights came on. Being a “latchkey” kid. Late-night television ads literally asking our parents if they knew where we were. In the words of Han Solo, “it’s true. All of it.” We grew up living a life of independence. Our growth, though, was also shrouded in trauma. Born into the tail-end of the Vietnam Conflict, we lived through and witnessed more tragedy than most generations, not the least of which occurred on January 28, 1986. On that day, an entire generation of children witnessed in real-time, on boxy televisions wheeled into classrooms on metal carts, the disaster of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. We developed, honed, and mastered the coping mechanisms of sarcasm and cynicism as a result. And that is why the extraordinary events of the last week have triggered a long-suppressed PTSD many of us perhaps didn’t even know we were harboring.   By "events...