My life partner, John, is fascinated with the moon. The Apollo moon missions left a lasting impression. I was too young to remember the moon landing but, with my lifelong love affair with planet Earth, I was shaped by the famous Earthrise photo taken by astronaut William Anders during the 1968 Apollo 8 mission. The photo, showing our beautiful blue and white marble of a planet floating in black space, has been called the most influential environmental photograph in history. It had a spiritual impact on humanity’s collective consciousness and is believed to have been instrumental in the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s.
When the Artemis II mission launched an epic moonshot ten days ago, I didn’t share John’s level of enthusiasm, but the first few communications from the crew changed that. Over the past ten days, four human beings, have hurtled through space in a high-tech tin can named Orion, passed around the backside of the moon, seeing sights no human eye has ever beheld before, and are now on their way back to Earth. They are set to begin the fiery reentry into Earth’s atmosphere at around 5pm Pacific time tonight. I’ll be watching.
The crew aboard Orion includes Christina Koch, the first woman to travel around the moon, Victor Glover, the first black person to travel to the moon, and Jeremy Hanson, the first Canadian to travel to the moon. Astronaut Reid Wiseman rounds out the team. The first thing that struck me was how joyful and poetic their language has been. No tough guy, braggadocio, just awe and love.
As they shot into space, Jeremy Hanson said, “As we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration. We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear.”
On day two, Victor Glover shared to those of us back on Earth, “Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful. And from up here, you also look like one thing. Homo sapiens, all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like, we’re all one people.”
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As the little ship got ready to go behind the moon and lose communications, a person named Jenny, from Houston control said to the astronauts, “You are 6 minutes from your 40-minute lunar fly-by .... For all of us, it’s a privilege to witness you carry the fire past our farthest reach.” Glover replied, closing with, “As we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love. … And as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we still feel your love from Earth, and to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the Moon.”
On the far side of the moon, they got to see an “Earthset,” in which the Earth dropped below the lunar horizon, and a stunning view of the moon eclipsing the sun. Reid Wiseman noted, “No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal. I know there’s no adjectives. I’m going to need to invent some new ones to describe what we are looking at out this window.”
After forty minutes of radio silence, Orion cleared the far side of the moon and communications picked up again. Christina Koch, having seen sights no human eyes had ever seen before, stated, “We will explore. We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. … We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”
What a contrast: Trump’s threat to obliterate an entire civilization with the astronaut’s call for love and unity and the awe-inspiring photos beaming back to us from space. Commander Wiseman took this amazing image and titled it “Hello World”. It shows our planet in all its splendor, including both northern and southern auroras (top right and bottom left) as the Earth eclipses the Sun.
This unity, humility, and unabashed love displayed by these four explorers is such a valuable gift against the backdrop of ugliness in America and war zones just now. An earlier iconic photo was taken by the Voyager 1 mission in 1990. In “the Pale Blue Dot,” the Earth, a tiny, blue-tinged pixel in a sea of black, is barely discernible from the stars thousands of light-years away.
Inspired by that humbling photograph, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:
“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there — on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . .
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
The souls aboard Orion have travelled further from Earth than any human beings. They have witnessed beauty and mystery never before seen and they have done their best in image and word to share those miracles with the rest of us. Their work, and the glorious way in which they are going about it, reminds us that humans can indeed do magnificent things together. We can find a better way of living, and leading. We can find more reverence for this magnificent planet that sustains us.
I send prayers for their safe return. I send prayers for healing the insanity within humanity. I send most fervent prayers for all the glorious lifeforms on this pale blue dot called Earth that I love to the moon and back.
Here is the link to the NASA page where you can access more photos and information for the Artemis II mission.
Much love,
Cylvia
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