Space Exploration Doesn’t Start with Rockets. It Starts with Stories

The Moon is Trending

In April 2026, the Artemis II crew flew around the far side of the moon. They were the first humans to do it in over fifty years. The images were everywhere, with the Earth rising behind the lunar surface. A solar eclipse seen from a place no living person has witnessed, the whole world watched in awe, and to be honest, I became quite emotional.

When NASA asked the crew to describe the experience in a single word, mission specialist Christina Koch said ‘humility’. Not triumph or pride, but humility. I have been thinking about the meaning of that word.

A Rubbish Dump on Earth

I wrote a space-adventure children’s book back in 2020, and the character isn’t an astronaut. He’s a polar bear teddy stripped of his powers, dumped in a rubbish bin, and rescued by a nine-year-old girl called Oakleigh. She builds a rocket out of a cardboard box and kitchen roll holders and names it Hark-9.

People sometimes describe Paddy the Polar Bear Teddy as a cute space adventure story; it is, but it’s also about what happens when you land somewhere unfamiliar, when your normal has been taken away, and when the world you are navigating was unintentionally built without you in mind. I don’t have to create or imagine that; it’s the world I live in.

Tuesday Morning

There’s a moment in the book where Paddy lands in a rubbish bin on Earth and tries to use his magic to get home, and nothing happens. His powers are gone, he’s alone in a place he doesn’t understand, surrounded by creatures he’s never seen, and nobody can hear him. That’s not just fiction; it’s a Tuesday morning for many disabled people. You arrive somewhere, the thing you usually rely on isn’t working, and you have to figure it out in real time.

The Overview Effect and Taking a Step Back

What I find interesting about the Artemis mission is that the astronauts kept talking about perspective. Victor Glover, the first black astronaut to travel beyond the Earth’s orbit, looked back at the Earth and said that from up there, we all look like one thing. No matter where you’re from or what you look like. That’s the Overview Effect, the cognitive change that happens when you see your planet from far enough away that all the categories we cling to just fall away.

Stories do the same thing, no, not by sending you two hundred and fifty thousand miles into space, but by putting you inside someone else’s experience and letting you see it from there. When a child reads about Paddy losing everything and still finding a way forward, they are not learning about polar bears. They are learning that courage doesn’t require certainty, and that kindness, the kind where you pull a stinky teddy out of a rubbish dump because you see something worth caring about, is not soft, but the thing that starts the whole adventure.

The Villain Who Was Hiding

Then there’s Queen Zeena, the villain of the book; she’s a walrus who creates devastating storms across her entire planet because she’s terrified of being seen as she is. She thinks being different makes her unlovable, so she hides behind destruction. She’d rather ruin everything than risk someone looking at her and confirming her worst fear.

That fear factor, the shame, children understand it, even if they can’t pinpoint why yet. They know what it feels like to think something about yourself is wrong. Zeena isn’t defeated by force, but by someone who tells her the truth, that everyone is beautiful, and that what matters is who you are from within, and it’s okay to be different, accept yourself, and others. Paddy says it plainly because he believes it, and he’s lived it.

The Real Launchpad

Every astronaut was once a child imagining space. They started with stories, curiosity, and a sense of wonder about what’s out there. The Artemis II crew didn’t wake up one morning, knowing how to fly around the Moon. They followed their dreams, slowly building up experience, fuelled by imagination and the accumulated belief that anything was possible.

That’s what children’s books do when they do what job they’re supposed to do. They don’t just entertain; they teach, rehearse, give children a version of courage before they find it, and show them that difference isn’t always an obstacle, but sometimes it’s the qualification. That the people best equipped to explore the unknown are often the ones who’ve already had to.

Oakleigh doesn’t hesitate when Paddy asks her to fly to another planet, doesn’t have the right tools or experience, but still, she has cardboard, fairy dust, and the willingness to accompany him on an adventure. That’s not a fantasy; it’s how the most interesting things in life sometimes start.

The Artemis crew came home; the footage was extraordinary. But somewhere tonight, a child is lying in bed with a book open, imagining something impossible.

That’s where the next mission begins.