Maybe It's Time To Take A Chance

At 10:35 a.m. on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the first flight. The flight covered about 120 feet, lasted 12 seconds, and landed.

Man could suddenly fly.

Then, on April 10, 2026, about 123 years later, Artemis II landed in the Pacific Ocean after flying for 10 days, traveling a total of 700,237 miles (about 30 million times farther), reaching speeds of 25,000 miles per hour.

And it just blows my mind what can happen in 123 years. Like, I just don’t get it.

My great-grandfather was born in 1899. So he was just a child when the Wright brothers were experimenting with flight on the coast of eastern North Carolina. As a child, was his imagination even capable of picturing humans flying 240,000 miles to the moon - circling it - and coming back home to tell everyone about it?

And I’m not talking about the kind of progress made since the Old Testament of the Bible. I’m talking about the progress made since the birth of someone I knew and loved.

And the Wright brothers - surely they were not thinking about rockets or orbits or the moon. They simply wanted to prove man could power an aircraft off the ground, into the air currents, and control it while it was there.

After doing just that for 12 seconds, could they have imagined where that would one day take us?

All of us.

Could they have imagined this man - me - glued to a screen, watching a spacecraft from Artemis II splash into the Pacific Ocean at 8:07 p.m. - exactly the time mission control said it would - after completely leaving the atmosphere the Wright brothers simply dreamed of entering?

But isn’t that the way possibility unfolds?

Life is full of perceived limits. But once a limit is removed… well, look out. Anything is possible.

Before the Wrights’ flight, flight belonged to birds and imagination. After, it belonged to us.

And once something becomes possible, it rarely stays contained.

It stretches. It evolves. It invites the next questions.

If we can lift off the ground, how high can we go?

If we can go higher, can we leave the atmosphere?

If we can leave Earth, can we reach the moon?

I wonder how many of us fail to reach the moons of our lives because we stop asking, Can I?

Or maybe we ask… and then quickly answer our own question:

No. That’s not possible.

When my great-grandfather was a baby, man had not left the ground. A baby born yesterday was born into a world where man has traveled 240,000 miles away from it - and come back.

Time didn’t make that possible.

Curiosity did.

Belief did.

Taking a chance did.

What do you believe is possible, but refuse to take a chance on?

The Wright brothers believed man could fly.

We’re still discovering just how far that belief could take us.