Looking at the moon, knowing there are people around it, is such a surreal thing. The last Apollo mission took place years before I was born, and I grew up when the Space Shuttle was all there really was–we had taken a step backwards, especially when considering the scope of its mission was to assemble a space station and it didn’t start doing that until a couple of decades after it began flying.
Maybe this is truly the start of a permanent presence up there, despite the comings and goings of various administrations with a multitude of incompatible objectives (and budget cuts) that blow with the winds. I still have hope that having space companies more separate from all of those political winds like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Axiom, etc. will help perpetuate that momentum.