Our capacity to bear witness to space exploration by looking up at the stars distinguishes it from polar exploration, which is always hidden from view.
These past few nights, I’ve looked up at the Moon and thought how surreal it is that humans were headed there. Shooting through the stars were four astronauts in a spacecraft hurtling 40,000 kilometers per hour through the blackness of Earth, spiriting farther away from home than any human in history. For a brief moment, Orion, NASA’s $20 billion deep-space vehicle, formed one of the stars itself. One amateur astronomer even claimed to have captured it with his telescope.
There’s something special about the fact that all 8.3 billion of us human beings can look up at the Moon each night and witness this spectacle firsthand. We may not be able to make out the astronauts with our naked eyes, but we can still gaze up at the skies and know that in our field of view, there are four intrepid souls.
Our capacity to collectively bear witness to space exploration distinguishes it from polar exploration. When people venture to the North or South Pole, we can’t look out across the horizon and know that they are there in quite the same way. Even if we were already in the Arctic or Antarctica, within a few minutes or hours, those explorers would disappear behind some glacier, snowfield, or mountain.
In contrast to the Earth’s extremities, the totality of space envelops all of us. Our inescapable inclusion in the cosmos is both humbling and unifying. With a change in perspective achieved with a bit of ingenuity and brute force, astronauts can watch the Moon dwarf our marbled planet, and then share that inverted vantage with us.
The Earth setting under the Moon as captured by astronauts onboard Artemis II on 6 April 2026. Source: NASA
The vastness of cosmic geometries also makes it possible for a single photo of Earth taken from tens of thousands of kilometers away to encompass all of humanity at once, save for the four Artemis II astronauts. Even the seven crew members currently onboard the International Space Station (ISS) are so close to Earth, orbiting just 400 kilometers above its surface, that they’re somewhere in that frame, too. Artemis II ventured 406,771 kilometers farther away from Earth than the ISS – 100,000 times farther.
Sitting in my office yesterday, I watched the NASA livestream of Artemis II’s historic lunar fly-by. The Moon beamed into my computer in Seattle in real time, just as three Americans and one Canadian were staring at it with their own eyes. Seeing all the excited comments cascade down the side of my screen added to the digital rapture. I felt a part of a cultural moment, but in a detached way given that the Internet was mediating my experience. In truth, it was being able to look up at the skies each night and see the Moon for myself that made Artemis II something I felt a part of, even if I couldn’t actually discern the spacecraft among the stars.
Compared to the Moon, for most people, the North and South Pole will forever remain invisible. It won’t be something they can see and then dream about reaching. The commander of Artemis II, American astronaut Reid Wiseman, captured this proximity when he reflected on what the Moon means to him in a NASA podcast last month. He offered:
“When I was younger, I would look at the moon when my brother was away at college, and we had a pretty close relationship, and just knowing he’s looking at that same moon, we’re pretty far apart from each other. But when I’m looking at the moon, he’s looking at the moon…Like I think the moon, for so many humans, is an anchor. It is a calendar. It is a spiritual symbol. The moon can be so many things, but it is just that concept – it’s the one thing that we all look up at, and it is the same, and we have very similar dreams across the entire planet. And to me, when I look at the moon, it is connection to civilization on planet Earth. That is what I think about.”
Wiseman tragically lost his wife to cancer in 2020 and has been raising their two children on his own. While Artemis II was slingshotting around the Moon, Canadian crew member Jeremy Hansen announced that they wished to name a crater after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll. This is a bright crater always visible from Earth, allowing the commander, who was clearly moved by the gesture, to see it each night.
Despite the billionaires, space exploration remains a collective endeavor
In a recent blog post, “Trump vs Nasa”, British journalist Ian Dunt argues that space exploration has become “right-wing coded.” His observation is both astute and concerning. Elon Musk and a number of other “space billionaires” have indeed turned the heavens into a Silicon Valley playground where tech tycoons, venture capitalists, and commercial satellite companies play fast and loose. At the same time, Musk’s company, SpaceX, has brought the cost of launch down by 90%, expanding access to what used to be a frontier only a select few governments could reach.
Nevertheless, in the public imagination in recent years, space has lost much of its ability to unite. Concerns over its creeping weaponization and militarization, especially with proposals like US President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome, which would place interceptor missiles and satellites into orbit to defend the American homeland, further transform space into a battlefield rather than a blackboard for shared dreams. Golden Dome, too, would contravene the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans placing weapons in space.
It may be naive, but I’m hopeful that the Artemis II restores public belief in space exploration as a unifying endeavor. This is something that admittedly, the polar regions will never be able to achieve despite being closer to us than the Moon, let alone Mars. The Artemis II mission beautifully reminds us that space is a frontier for humanity to explore.
Artemis II may not be truly cosmopolitan, but unlike Apollo, which was an all-American undertaking, this NASA mission strives for diversity. Among its astronauts are a woman (Christina Koch), a Black man (Victor Glover) and a Canadian (Jeremy Hansen). The cubesats, or small satellite, that the spacecraft slung into orbit soon after launch were Argentinian, German, Korean, and Saudi. And the European Space Agency, which itself brings together 23 countries, provided Orion’s life support, power, and propulsion module.
By virtue of their terrestriality, the polar regions will always remain the purview of individual groups of people like the predecessors of the Inuit, who ventured across the Bering Strait, hardy pioneers on foot and on skis, and national governments. Of course, there are undertakings like the MOSAiC expedition (2019-2020), which brought 20 countries together to study the changing Arctic Ocean. But these initiatives lack the universality of space exploration because they will always be apart from most people. Paradoxically, it is the enormous scale of the cosmos that means everyone is a part of it.
I realize that this collective celestial spirit is partly an illusion. But it’s partly grounded in Earthly realities, too. No matter where we are on the planet, we can look up at the skies and feel that we are along for the ride when it comes to journeys through space because its infinite horizons include us all.
The Earth’s polar regions: always extending out of view. Photo: Greenland Ice Sheet from an airplane, June 2026. M. Bennett
Artemis II astronauts experience a 54-minute solar eclipse
Fundamentally, Earth is traveling around the sun at 107,000 kilometers per hour, so we’re always on a little space trot ourselves. I felt this sense of movement at a cosmic scale for the first time when I witnessed the total solar eclipse in Dallas, Texas in April 2024. I’d seen the eclipse in Kentucky in 2017, and the skies were clear enough. Totality in Dallas felt far more striking, though. As the Moon passed directly between the Sun and the Earth, I finally sensed with my own body what it meant to exist on a heavenly body. For a brief moment, the corporeal and the celestial coalesced.
The total solar eclipse in Dallas, Texas on 8 April 2024, as viewed through my phone.
This morning when I woke up, the first thing I glimpsed was NASA’s Artemis II Lunar Fly-By gallery, sent to me by a fellow space enthusiast in a time zone several hours ahead. Awestruck, I scrolled in bed at the photos of the total solar eclipse that the astronauts witnessed from the opposite perspective of how the phenomenon is experienced on Earth.
As the Artemis II astronauts flew around the dark side of the Moon, they experienced totality for an incredible 54 minutes. In one go, that’s already almost half as long as the amount of time that any human has spent in totality on Earth, where the longest total eclipses are still usually under four minutes. (Solar eclipse devotees who travel around the world in hot pursuit of the disappearing Sun keep close records of such esoteric statistics, tracking who has spent the most time in the Moon’s shadow.) That also means that the Artemis II astronauts could not see their home planet for almost an hour.
As the Moon concealed the Earth and Sun from Artemis II, its astronauts even witnessed the stuff of science fiction. They saw four or five meteors hit the surface, igniting what are called “impact flashes.” The Moon has no atmosphere, so meteors are constantly blasting its pockmarked surface, yet these little fireballs are hard to glimpse from Earth. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to see all this incandescent detail up close – and yet, because the Moon hangs in the sky each night (and thanks to high-resolution photography), I sort of can.
The Moon eclipsing the Earth and Sun, with Venus as a dazzling speck of light to the left, as seen by Artemis II on 6 April 2026. Source: NASA
Next stop: The (lunar) South Pole
The mission of Artemis II is to work towards establishing continuous human presence in space. With the program’s fourth stage, Artemis IV, NASA is aiming for a crewed landing near the South Pole in 2028 using commercial landers from either or both SpaceX and Blue Origin, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ space company.
The South Pole is believed to hold significant amounts of water ice accumulated from billions of years of impacts by comets and asteroids. While sunlight reaches the Moon’s poles, it shines at a very low angle, never illuminating the interior of deep craters. These “Permanently Shadowed Regions” such as the Shackleton crater, named, aptly, after the indefatigable British Antarctic explorer, could hold vast amounts of frozen water. These icy stores could support sustained human presence – particularly when combined with the little bit of sunlight that does graze the craters’ rims.
Two other craters nearby are named Nobile, after the Italian explorer who piloted an airship over the North Pole in 1908, and Amundsen, after the Norwegian explorer who was the first to venture through the Northwest Passage between 1903-1906 in one slow, painstaking transit.
A temperature map of the lunar south pole. Several craters are named after lunar explorers. Source: NASA
No Western country has ever reached the lunar south pole. Only China and India’s lunar rovers have visited the remote region, making it one of the few instances in the history of modern exploration in which BRICS countries have bested the Global North. China’s Chang’E-7 lunar mission, scheduled for launch in August 2026, is aiming to explore the Shackleton Crater to probe for water ice and scout possible future locations for a lunar base. China aims to send taikonauts to the Moon by 2030, but likely to an equatorial landing spot rather than the south pole.
If NASA succeeds in its endeavor to send people to the Moon’s underbelly, it will achieve polar convergence between Earth and the Moon. Yet from our planet, even with the most powerful telescopes, we will not be able to see Artemis III land on the lunar south pole because it is always hidden from view. Polar exploration, it seems, will forever remain shrouded in mystery, regardless of whether its pioneers are on Earth or the Moon.
In the meantime, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Orion and its four astronauts have a safe journey back to Earth, where they should splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday 10 April at 5:07 pm.
The constellation Orion as viewed from San Francisco, California on 4 April 2026, just as the spacecraft Orion was hurtling through the sky. Not too far from here in the Pacific Ocean, the spacecraft should splash down on 10 April.
For further lunar exploration…
What I’m listening to: Chet Faker – ‘Far Side of the Moon‘ (2026)
What I’m reading: Robert Heinlein – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
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