This is one of my favorite images of any astronaut, mostly because I felt like this so many times on the Moon. I don't have time, though, to stop and put my hands on my hips and just be 'King of the Moon'.

It takes a lot of cockiness to be an astronaut; to believe you can leave this planet Earth inside a small, delicate spacecraft riding a giant powerful rocket. To bet your life that you and your fellow crewmembers, and all your friends in mission control, and the hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists that built the rocket and spacecraft have done and will do their jobs with consumate skill and dedication. Being an astronaut takes a special kind of faith and confidence in yourself and in your team.

I plan to paint this image in several different ways in the future. Will I ever get to it? I don't know. I am 72 years old now, and have a lot of other paintings that need to be painted, stories that will be lost forever if they are not told. What I should do next is a question I ask myself several times each day.