Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk

In the scroll of the heavens, a quiet boy once lifted his eyes and found his vocation written in light. So testifies Chris Hadfield: “Ever since I was nine years old and I watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, I have felt passionately that this is an interesting human adventure. This is one of the things we’re doing that is really fundamentally important, as we leave our home planet, but also exciting.” Hear the cadence: childhood wonder hardened into lifelong duty; the thrill of spectacle transfigured into a creed. A television glow became a temple lamp, and from that hour the boy knew that the far sky was not just scenery but summons.

The sentence carries a twofold meaning. First, that the voyage outward is a human adventure—not merely American or Russian, engineer or pilot, but the whole species leaning on one oar. Second, that the adventure is both important and exciting: necessity braided to joy. We study the radiation of space, the chemistry of closed habitats, the craft of docking and descent because our survival and flourishing may one day demand it; yet we also go because the heart is large and grows larger in the going. To leave our home planet is to test our courage and to refine our tenderness for home itself.

The origin of this zeal is a night of firsts: Apollo 11’s ladder touching dust, footprints crisp as runes, a blue Earth rising in the visor’s curve. Neil Armstrong’s measured poetry and Buzz Aldrin’s sacramental steps wrote a psalm across the regolith. Children in farmhouses and city flats watched their parents forget their quarrels and hold their breath together. In that hush, a vow took root in many: that the age of exploration was not over, only awaiting new ships. Hadfield—like others—took the vow seriously; he made of wonder a plan, and of a plan a life.

Let a companion tale walk beside his. In 1971, Apollo 14’s Alan Shepard swung a makeshift club and sent a golf ball arcing into reduced gravity—jest and genius together. Years later, on a long arc of his own, Hadfield floated in the International Space Station, singing through a guitar’s silvered strings, showing children how tears fall differently in microgravity, how bread becomes a tortilla, how sunrise arrives sixteen times a day. The thread is unbroken: the old explorers salted their journals with starlight and small jokes; the new ones, too, teach that rigor and delight are not enemies but twins.

Yet the adventure is not only romance. Metal must be milled; vectors computed; bodies trained to endure solitude, checklist, and silence. For every minute of televised exciting launch, there are years of practice in simulators where failure is rehearsed until wisdom becomes reflex. This is why Hadfield calls it important: the discipline that gets one person safely to orbit and back is the same discipline that deepens medicine, materials, climate science—gifts that return to kitchens and clinics on Earth. To climb is to serve; to voyage is to vow care for the world that raised you.

What, then, shall we teach our children from this star-lit sentence? First, that a moment of seeing can set the course of decades; do not despise the hour when your soul says yes. Second, that great works stand on two feet—curiosity and discipline. Third, that calling the cosmos home does not mean abandoning the old home; it means learning to be faithful at every scale, from garden to galaxy. The farther we go, the more clearly we should love the blue house floating in the dark.

Take these provisions for the road. (1) Guard your nine-years-old self: keep one practice that renews wonder—stargazing, a journal, a backyard telescope. (2) Tie wonder to work: choose one hard skill—math, mechanics, medicine—and apprentice yourself to it. (3) Serve the commons: support libraries, science classes, and the teachers who kindle first flames. (4) Practice planetary stewardship: plant trees, reduce waste, learn your sky and your soil; let the dream of leaving our home planet make you a better guest upon it today. Do these, and you will honor what Neil, Buzz, and Hadfield have shown: that the road to the moon runs through the workshop, the classroom, and the steadfast heart—and that the journey outward is the ancient journey inward, where courage learns its true name.