It's a bright spot

Artemis II

Finally, there’s an unprecedented event that’s a joy to live through: the Artemis II Space Mission. There’s a tremendous amount of context to catch up on here, for anyone who hasn’t spent the past week and a half quietly weeping over Artemis II and the moon, like I have.

Via NASA

Though poetry works best when based in subtlety, I think there’s a time for explicitness to highlight the bewildering: Artemis II launched on the day of the pink full moon. NASA named the program for the moon goddess and the spacecraft Orion for the man Artemis loved and lost/possibly killed, depending on the version of the myth you read. Christina Koch is the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit and journey around the Moon. Victor Glover is the first Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The crew requested that a crater on the far side of the moon be named for Reid Wiseman’s late wife. This is farther than humans have traveled in space, and yet, those of us still on earth have been a part of it in a way that’s never been possible before, thanks to technology.

This hasn’t only been a space mission; it’s been the poetic ruminations of four people experiencing the unfathomable, and sharing their reactions with their fellow humans in real-time, with the romantic language that I do not often hear used outside of my literary female friend circles.

Not only did the Artemis II crew transmit their messages, but we responded. In the way we’ve become accustomed to communicating, in social media posts and memes and timely newsletter posts (hi!) shared across the internet with a speed that is also unprecedented.

These astronauts did not only transmit into the void, they invited responses, with both intentionality and inevitability. They knew how to share, which turned into a profound feedback loop between those communicating and those receiving in a way that has never existed in this form before. Every other space mission, the astronauts went, and people waited for their return, only to be told what was experienced and shown what was captured earlier. This time, the chat was live. The astronauts posted, we responded, they saw us respond, and they continued the conversation, in a new kind of collective witnessing.

This crew, and everyone involved in this mission, took part in extraordinary science, but also, groundbreaking art. They’re indistinguishable from each other in this mission in a way that almost never happens. The science required the poetry. We can’t process what it means to see the earth from 300,000 miles away without reaching for language, without reaching for imagery, without reaching for metaphor. These are scientists at the edge of human experience, and we’re all discovering that science alone cannot hold what we’re seeing.

And then there’s the art that came from it—the poems, the haikus, the jokes, the images, the illustrations. The connections to stories, books, movies, plays, and more that people made as they looked at their screens, and up into the night sky.

One thing that struck me about this experience was the crew, specifically: their sincerity, their delight, their playfulness that went hand in hand with their competence and capabilities. These people have heart, and they’ve been wearing their hearts on their space suit sleeves, for all of us to see.

Via NASA

They’ve said things like:



“Ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.” (Christina Koch)

“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.” (Reid Wiseman)

“As we get close to the nearest point to the Moon and the farthest point from Earth and continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries on Earth, and that’s love. And to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you, from the moon.” (Victor Glover)

“I hope this mission is giving you something that you can take and put in your pocket, or in your heart and mind that you keep with you, but it’s not because we want you to see what we’ve tried to show you. It’s because we want you to take this and build a vocabulary to explain the world to us.” (Victor Glover)

“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll.” (Jeremy Hansen)

The whole mission, when you strip it down, is a love note to what we are, and what we can do, and what we can’t stop reaching toward.

Via NASA

The crew returns today, and we will continue to hold the enormity of what this mission accomplished, and what it has made possible in the future, along with what it means to be an earnest human sitting in awe of what surrounds us. We’ll all continue to share ourselves—our writing, our art, our thoughts, our reflections—into the dark, hoping someone out there receives them.

I encourage everyone to explore the Artemis II Multimedia gallery. Which photos made you cry the hardest? Which made life feel both entirely inconsequential and infinitely precious at once? Which one unspooled a poem in your heart as you gazed at the impossibility of it all?

We are all, every one of us, part of this. Not as spectators, but as participants. We received the transmissions and we responded, and we made art and we cried in our kitchens and we sent the videos to the people we love and we said look, look at this, look at what we are. That's not small. That's the whole thing. Artemis summoned Orion to the moon, and somewhere in the mythology of all of this, we went too. Every person who watched, who wept, who wrote, who shared—we were in that window.