Think of What We Can Do, Together

NASA is going where no man, woman, or nonbinary person has ever gone before: The other side of the Moon. In early April, the four-person Artemis II crew began journeying more than 252,000 miles from Earth—the farthest any human-manned spaceflight has traveled—on a ten-day excursion to “evaluate systems, procedures, and performance in deep space.” Instead of the vain, celebrity-driven space trips that Americans have recently become accustomed to—mostly fueled by the egos of vapid billionaires—the Artemis II mission is run by human experts, legitimate engineers, and scientists, who are as wowed by the universe that exists outside of Earth’s atmosphere as ordinary individuals are.

As the crew prepared to lift off, each member shared a brief statement about what would be motivating them during the mission: “We’re are going for our families,” said pilot Victor Glover, the first Black person to travel to the Moon. “We are going for our teammates,” said mission specialist Christina Koch, the first woman to journey around the Moon. “We are going for all humanity,” said mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

Ordinarily, such statements would strike me as sappy, unnecessarily bleeding emotion in a precariously chaotic time. The armed forces of Israel and the United States are decimating schools and civilian homes in Iran; gas prices are increasing at an alarming rate within an economy that’s already not serving the majority of people in America; and a tyrannical autocrat is bulldozing over the rights of the most vulnerable among us, including LGBTQ+ children and their families and immigrants. In these times, where bleakness seems to be the order of the day, reminders that the universe is so much bigger than we can possibly comprehend seems to have struck a chord that isn’t easily shaken off or overlooked.

Since the Artemis II crew has left Earth’s orbit, NASA has been running a 24/7 livestream of the mission while the astronauts have been taking and releasing photos of the great wonders of space, including the darkness that surrounds Earth and the magnificence of the continent of Africa taking up a large swath of the planet’s surface area. Social media timelines, at least my own, are full of posts from novice and veteran space enthusiasts about all the various ways the Artemis II crew are documenting their own wonder about the universe and their own gratitude about being on this mission. Their humanity, something none of the crew seem to be shying away from, is one of the many aspects of their journey appealing to the millions following their space voyage (hundreds of thousands of people are watching the YouTube livestream at any given time).

“Being human up here is one of the coolest things about this mission,” Koch told NBC News. “We are just people trying to get by. For example, we might go look at the far side of the moon and take in its awesomeness and then go, ‘Hm, maybe I should change my socks,’ and try to dig around for a pair of socks. So, this is the dichotomy of human spaceflight.”

When we consider that the wealthiest among us are attempting to peddle artificial intelligence, an unfeeling entity, as the great answer to every woe facing our species, it is unsurprising that there’s such a deep investment in four humans, with their human eyes, their human feelings, and their human impulses, being thrust into the ether to document the surface of another celestial body and transmit their findings to us, other humans. No one person can steer a spacecraft. No one crew member’s view is prioritized over the perspective of the others sharing their small space. Their ability to safely journey hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth and eventually splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, California, relies on more than a single astronaut’s ego. During this journey, these astronauts are bound together—as we all are.