Starting Monday, America is going back to the moon.

This time around, we’re not just putting a man on the moon. We’re going to put a woman on the moon as well.

And that woman could very well end up being Jessica Watkins, who hails from Lafayette, Colo.

“It’s very exciting to have that be a possibility, especially for me as a planetary geologist, you know,” she told our reporter, David Mullen. “I did a lot of my graduate work on the geology of other surfaces, so to be able to go and actually put boots on those surfaces would be a dream come true.”

Watkins grew up in Colorado and her parents still live in Lafayette. She left the state to attend Stanford University and become an astronaut, but whenever she gets back here to visit her parents, she’s right back hiking, rock climbing and skiing.

Jessica is one of nine women in the 18-member astronaut corps for the new moon mission, which is named Artemis, after the twin sister of Apollo from Greek mythology.

The name is no accident. Artemis plans to pick up where the famed Apollo program left off in 1972, but this time we’ll be sending all sorts of diverse crews of astronauts to the moon. NASA has promised that Artemis will land the first person of color to the moon as well.

Watkins could be both the first woman and the first person of color. Currently she’s floating around on the International Space Station, the first Black woman to ever do that.

Watkins hopes that young girls and children of color see what she’s doing and know that they, too, can accomplish anything.

“I think representation is really important in whatever form it looks like, so somebody who looks like you, has the same background as you, came from the same place as you; whatever connection you can make can be helpful … in starting to see those paths of possibilities,” Watkins said.

Artemis has an array of women behind the scenes as well. Charlie Blackwell Thompson is the first female launch director. Sharon Cobb heads up the team that designed and built the the big new Artemis rocket for NASA; and Laura Poliah helped build the Orion capsule.

At Lockheed Martin Corp. in Colorado, where much of the Orion spacecraft was designed and built, Rosemary Tetreault Sargent is the Orion International Integration and Compliance senior manager. At Centennial-based United Launch Alliance, Julia Paez is the ULA Propulsion System design lead for the Artemis program. Paez graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder.

About 30% of NASA’s senior executives are women, and the team working on the moon mission is 35% female.

“The folks that are helping to build this rocket, there are the managers, the chief engineers, there are women that are in very strong, capable positions everywhere we look,” Blackwell Thompson told NBC News.

“When we go back to the moon, with the first woman, the first person of color … those iconic boot prints mean that space and exploration are for everyone,” she said.

The prospect of going back to the moon reminded me of a time when we Americans thought we could do anything. I remember the Apollo 11 moon launch like it was yesterday.

I was 9 years old and we were supposed to go paddle-boating at City Park under the colored light fountains in the middle of the lake there. I was pissed when Dad canceled the outing so we could watch some silly moon landing thing on the fuzzy black-and-white TV. Compared to cartoons, the so-called “news” and other grownup stuff on TV was just so boooooring!

And then Neil Armstrong leapt into the moon dust, and instantly I wanted to be an astronaut. So did all my friends. And every little boy in America.

My friends and I started building tinfoil-and-toothpick lunar modules in our bedrooms and firing Estes model rockets into the Denver stratosphere. Sometimes we’d strap funnels on our heads and count down backward from 10 and then scream “Liftoff!” and run around crazily with our hands at our sides like we were human speeding rockets.

Astronauts were suddenly our superheroes, role models and gods.

I remember the year before that first manned moon landing, 1968, had been an incredibly bad year, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and riots in the streets of Chicago and body bags coming home from Vietnam. Sort of felt like the country was flying apart.

But that tumultuous year ended on a high note in December when Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman became the first humans to orbit the moon. After reemerging from the dark side of the moon, Lovell famously announced: “Houston, please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”

Apollo raised our sights again — to the heavens — and made us 9-year-old boys think that anything might be possible in our lives. If you were an American back then, well, that meant in everything you did, from here on out, you shot for the moon.

I’m kinda hoping 9-year-old girls get that same feeling on Monday. And I’m kinda hoping that feeling of a soaring America is a little bit contagious, just like it was back in the Apollo days.

And I’m kinda hoping Artemis and its cross-section of astronauts can bring us together some, lift our eyes back up and help us shoot for the stars again.

Monday’s flight to the moon is uncrewed, so it won’t be until the third Artemis flight, probably in 2025, when a woman actually sets foot on the moon.

So in the journey back to the heights, Monday is just the start. You might say tomorrow is just one small step for a woman.

But it could be one giant leap for womankind.