News and Politics

Why a Journey to the Moon Moved Us So Deeply

And what the stars have to teach us about caring for each other here on Earth

Alicia Stoller

12 Apr 2026 — 9 min read

"Mother Earth," photo from Artemis II, NASA

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“There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.”

~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

I have a vivid memory of the first time my son noticed that he could see the Moon during the day. He was two years old and we were walking down a street in the middle of Manhattan. (Seriously, hang out with two-year-olds. I’m telling you.) “Mommy!” he exclaimed, pointing at the sky and declaring with surprise and delight that he could see the Moon amidst the bright blue daylight, as if it was a friend he’d suddenly spotted in an unexpected place.

The Moon is an early point of wonder, imagination, and metaphor for children. Its omnipresence in picture books makes it feel familiar and almost anthropomorphised, while its glow, distance, and constant shape shifting imbue it with mystery. The Moon also offers a perpetual reference point for separation and attachment, which is perhaps the most significant developmental project of childhood—and really of our whole lives. Each month, it gradually disappears and reappears, while we sit in the darkness together with our children, learning to trust that this far-off light will return to us.

The fact that humans have traveled to the Moon remains one of the most stunning accomplishments of our imagination and of our ability to learn and create together. Our exploration of space has never been politically or motivationally tidy. But it is, nonetheless, evidence of the power of human wonder and curiosity to spur the seemingly impossible into being.

Last week’s news made the contradictory powers of human science mind-bogglingly clear, as we swung from global terror to awe. We saw our capacity to harness forces that vastly magnify our otherwise fragile power on dramatic display. As many of us gazed skyward, marveling at the images returning from the small NASA crew hurtling through space aboard Artemis II, children in Iran and Lebanon looked up at the same sky and wondered if they would live to see another moonlit night.

Both stories are evidence of the fact that the value of scientific discovery lies entirely in what we choose to do with our knowledge and our ingenuity. And both stories are evidence of the thin line we walk each day between the dangers of our deeply human lust for conquest and the rewards of our equally human capacity for empathy and for collective awe.

While it is often easiest for us to empathize with those closest at hand, both in measures of proximity and intimacy, many people stretched these capacities last week multiple times over. We felt the shared fear and heartbreak of our care circling the globe, as we waited in horror to see if our most destructive weapons would be unleashed over Tehran. Then, we felt this same force of care race beyond the stratosphere to reach across the greatest distance anyone has ever traveled, as we grew increasingly linked to the four startlingly gentle and relatable scientists, who circled the Moon.

As ordinary citizens in Iran formed human chains across bridges and around power plants, asking the world to see their humanity in the face of terror, four equally human scientists, holding each other with palpable care and dedication far from home, reminded us how short the distance between any two human lives on Earth every really is.

Whenever space exploration fills headlines, an argument is inevitably made that we shouldn’t be spending our financial or intellectual resources on traveling to the Moon or Mars when so many people here on Earth are living such precarious lives. I understand this impulse. Surely, we have a moral duty to alleviate suffering before all else. My own son—the same kid who gazed in wonder at the Moon and then spent several years drawing the solar system on every piece of paper he could find—also once told me that, “Humans don’t deserve space.” I feel the conflict of this impulse deeply, particularly as I look at him and worry about what it means, in the words of Shoshana Meira Friedman, to “teach my child to love a dying world.” And I feel it as I think about the children on the other side of the world, who waited for the sky to collapse on them last week.

When space exploration is framed through a narrative of profit and conquest, I find the argument that we don’t deserve to travel beyond Earth impossible to refute. The drive to conquer, dominate, and plant flags in every terrain we encounter has wrought so much pain and sorrow. The age of the anthropocene, shaped in so many ways by greed, often seems to be an age dominated by avoidable destruction. I wish for a future in which fewer children live in fear, under skies blackened by wildfires, bombs, and smog, and instead can look up at a bright moon and know that they do, in fact, deserve the freedom to contemplate the stars.

Last week, though, I think many people were reminded that it is possible for this to be the lesson we take from a journey into the heavens. It is possible for a mission that takes us farther from Earth than ever before to remind us of what is most precious and in need of our care and protection right here. It is possible to see, in the images of this planet taken from so far away, how very dependent we all are on one another and to see, in the Moon, not a frontier but a beacon.

The feeling of inspiration, potential, and wonder that was sparked, as a small vessel made its way around the Moon last week, was possible for very human reasons. It was clear, in the public response to this journey, that what moved people most was not the images from space, though they were stunning, or the potential for future colonization of that bright orb, though this is part of NASA’s plan, but rather the care and character of the four people who traveled there, and the reminder they articulated of how critical it is that we recommit to our interconnectedness here on the planet where we all live today. We watched as they cared for each other so far from home and family, laughed and played together in their small quarters, worked diligently alongside one another, and cried and embraced over their knowledge of each other’s most personal joys and sorrows.

In reflecting on the response to their journey after the crew returned, the Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, linked arms with his crew mates and said,

“What you saw was a group of people who loved contributing, having meaningful contribution, and extracting joy out of that. And what we’ve been hearing is that was something special for you to witness…I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”

We were presented with a stark choice last week. In the prospect of nuclear weapons being unleashed on Iran, we observed with heart-pounding urgency the cruelty and fear that conquest and domination both require and perpetuate. At the same time, we were also presented with an example of wonder and awe captured through the lens of four individuals, who clearly cared as deeply about each other as they did about their work, and who shared their discoveries and their reflections with excitement, gratitude, grace, and humility, not with ego or self-aggrandizement. These two paths for human possibility, playing out simultaneously in real time, feel profoundly interconnected. We may not deserve space, but perhaps we do need to see ourselves from the perspective of the Moon from time to time—not to be reminded of how powerful we could be if we extended our conquest beyond the reach of this planet, but rather to be reminded of how close together we all really are and of how much we need each other right here every day.

Christina Koch, who has broken multiple barriers in her career, only most recently as the first woman to travel to the Moon, could easily have taken the moment of the Artemis team’s return as an opportunity to bask in her accomplishments. Instead, like each of her crew mates, she considered the lessons of interdependence that their journey instilled in her. She described her understanding of the meaning of their journey together as a crew, and she reflected on the significance of the view of Earth from such a great distance. She said,

“A crew is a group that is in it all the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. So, when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And, honestly, what stuck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat, hanging undisturbingly in the universe. I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know. And that is: planet Earth, you are a crew.”

It is sometimes said that the perspective of space teaches us how insignificant we are in the scope of time and of the universe. Perhaps. But I think the lesson these four astronauts described is much more important—that precisely because this pinprick planet is surrounded by so much darkness and so much distance, we are inextricably bound together, and our care for each other here on Earth matters greatly. Our little place in a vast universe ought to make us matter even more deeply to one another than we already do. We may be small but we are all we have in the great reach of space, as we drift together in this beautiful blue lifeboat, charged with each other’s destinies.

As our hearts raced with the terrifying awareness of how easily we could destroy one another on Tuesday night, and then raced again with hopeful anticipation as we watched four people fly through the atmosphere in a halo of flames and land in the cool Pacific, we were granted two options for the future we want our children to live into. We can offer them a world filled with wild curiosity and abundant care, or a world of conquest and fear. We can choose to give them skies full of threats and thick with power and greed. Or we can invite them to look up and imagine lives filled with wonder, discovery, and camaraderie.

The proof of our choice, made again and again every day in a million small ways, lies in our willingness to be each other's crew. It is within our power every day to choose to treat each other with tenderness on this planet surrounded by dying stars.

Wishing you the perspective of the stars and a lifeboat filled with care,

Alicia

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P.S. Watch the remarks of all four Artemis II astronauts, upon their return home, here.