Four individuals are currently situated 19,000 miles from the Moon when they receive a message from the commander of Apollo 13.
“Greetings, Artemis II. This is Jim Lovell, an Apollo astronaut. Welcome to my former neighborhood,” he says.
In 1968, Lovell orbited the Moon, and in 1970, he navigated it again under dire circumstances, his crew’s survival reliant on calculations and sheer determination. For the next 97 years of his life, he awaited the return of humans to the Moon. Last August, he recorded a heartfelt message.
On the morning of April 6, mission control transmitted that message into the darkness of space. Reid Wiseman, one of the crew members, awoke to listen and then presented a silk square to the camera: the original Apollo 8 mission patch, which had traveled to the Moon in 1968 and was given to him by Lovell’s son before the launch.
“Good luck and Godspeed,” Lovell’s voice resonated, “from all of us here on the good Earth.”
At the launch pad, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, had consulted her team and received unanimous approval across all consoles.
This moment in 2026 encapsulates what it means to be human: to transmit the voice of someone who has passed into the vastness of space as an act of remembrance and compassion, while on Earth, we grapple with the losses that surround us. Which lives do we choose to honor, to remember, to invest in?
As NASA documents coordinates of marvel, we retain our historical records.
From Iraq in 2006, a military contractor’s whiteboard displayed a running tally of confirmed kills by various platoons, accompanied by a grim phrase scrawled underneath: “Let the bodies hit the floor.”
Two decades later, the Pentagon’s leader stood before the media, vowing Iran “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He proclaimed, “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies” – terminology that legal experts have cautioned could be interpreted as a war crime. He dubbed the operation Epic Fury and proposed a defense budget of $1.5 trillion, with an additional $200 billion specifically for Iran.
In stark contrast, NASA’s entire budget for human space exploration is $24.4 billion, a mere fraction compared to the proposed $1.5 trillion for defense.
Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to venture into deep space, gazed out at the shrinking planet:
“In all of this emptiness – this vast nothing we call the universe – there exists this oasis, this beautiful place where we can coexist.”
Christina Koch, the first woman to orbit the Moon, pressed against the window next to him, and together they formed heart shapes with their hands, the blue planet glowing behind them.
When asked to summarize the mission in one word, she replied: “humility.” She added, “None of us would be here without the countless individuals who came before us, starting with Neil Armstrong, Katherine Johnson, leaders of the civil rights movement, and everyone who contributed to this spacecraft.” Katherine Johnson was the mathematician whose calculations ensured Apollo’s success, a name that remained unrecognized in credits until society was compelled to acknowledge her contributions.
Reid Wiseman observed the entirety of the globe from his window—Africa, Europe, and the emerald hues of the northern lights shimmering at the edges. “It stopped all four of us in our tracks.”
Jeremy Hansen, surpassing the distance record set by Jim Lovell’s damaged Apollo 13 for 56 years, asked mission control if the crew could designate a name for a lunar feature.
“We lost a loved one,” he said, his voice quivering. “Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid and mother to Katie and Ellie.” He pointed to a bright spot on the lunar surface. “We would like to name it Carroll.”
The crew embraced for an extended moment after that.
A bright spot on the Moon now honors her name, visible to her children, destined to endure beyond all of us.
Then Koch, entering the Moon’s gravitational influence at 12:37 AM, communicated back: “We are now falling toward the Moon instead of ascending from Earth.”
Four years prior, I detailed the unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope into the cosmos—how it felt to witness humanity directing its greatest innovations not toward conflict, but toward exploring the profound questions of existence, driven solely by wonder.
While Webb gazed outward, Artemis brought us there.
Four individuals, alive and mourning, pressed their faces against the glass of a spacecraft they named Integrity.
Apollo was the pioneer, planting flags in her domain—now faded and indistinguishable from surrender after 50 years of radiation exposure.
And now, Artemis: the lunar huntress, wild and sovereign, safeguarding the untamed and punishing transgressions against the sacred. In Chinese mythology, Chang’e eluded mortality and ascended to the Moon, where she remains.
Hansen carried the Seven Sacred Teachings of the Anishinaabe people on his mission patch: respect, love, courage, humility, honesty, wisdom, and truth—crafted by Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation, who could never have foreseen his work traveling this far.
Carl Sagan once stated, “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
We are neither mere observers nor mere inheritors; we are something more complex and delicate.
To experience, if only briefly, the miracle of existence. A consciousness alive enough to transmit a deceased commander’s voice across the void, to commemorate a crater for a woman who did not survive, to press our faces against the glass and encapsulate every person we have ever cherished in a single image.
Meanwhile, beneath us, the toll of loss continues to rise. We maintain both the count of casualties and the star map in the same week, as we always have.
Small-minded individuals persist in waging war in the shadows.
Yet the huntress advances, carrying the part of humanity that remembers how to gaze up into the sky.
Flynn Coleman is an international human rights attorney, political scientist, and author of A Human Algorithm.
