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This week saw humanity at its worst. Artemis II told the opposite story | Flynn Coleman

Four people are sleeping 19,000 miles from the moon when the voice of Apollo 13’s commander arrives.

“Hello, Artemis II. This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood.”

Jim Lovell orbited the moon in 1968. He limped around it again in 1970 in a burning ship, his crew kept alive by mathematics and the will to survive. He spent the rest of his life – 97 years – waiting for someone to go back. Last August, he recorded a message.

On the morning of 6 April, mission control beamed it across the dark. Reid Wiseman woke, listened, then held something to the camera: a square of silk, the original Apollo 8 mission patch, flown to the Moon in 1968, pressed into his hands before launch by Lovell’s son.

“Good luck and Godspeed,” the old man’s voice said, “from all of us here on the good Earth.”

At the launch pad, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director who gave the final go-ahead, had polled her team and heard, from every console, a unanimous go.

This is what it is, in 2026, to be human: to send the voice of the dead across space as an act of continuity and care, while on Earth we tally the bodies. Which do we choose to fund, to name, to become?

While Nasa logs coordinates of wonder, we keep the old ledgers.

From Iraq, 2006: a military company’s whiteboard, a running tally – confirmed kills, each platoon’s count – a phrase scrawled beneath it: “Let the bodies hit the floor.”

Two decades later, the man running the Pentagon stood before cameras and promised Iran “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” He declared, on the record, “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies” - language legal scholars have warned may itself constitute a war crime. He named the operation Epic Fury and backed a $1.5tn defense budget, seeking $200bn more for Iran alone.

Nasa’s entire budget – everything it takes to send human beings beyond Earth – is $24.4bn. A rounding error beside the $1.5tn proposed for defense.

And yet.

Victor Glover, the first Black man to travel into deep space, floated to the window and watched the planet go small:

“In all of this emptiness – this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe – you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”

Christina Koch pressed her face to the glass beside him, the first woman to travel around the moon, and the two of them made hearts with their hands, Earth burning blue and alone behind the window.

When asked to describe the mission in a single word, she said: “humility”. Then: “We would never be here if it weren’t for so many people who came before us, starting with Neil Armstrong, Katherine Johnson, civil rights movement leaders, everyone who worked on this spacecraft before us.” Katherine Johnson: the mathematician whose calculations got Apollo there, whose name the credits left out until we were forced to remember.

Reid Wiseman watched the whole globe fill his window, Africa, Europe, the emerald northern lights curling at the edges. “It paused all four of us in our tracks.”

Jeremy Hansen, breaking the distance record Jim Lovell’s crippled Apollo 13 had held for 56 years, asked mission control if the crew could name something.

“We lost a loved one,” he said, his voice breaking. “Her name was Carroll. The spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie.” He pointed to a bright spot on the surface. “A bright spot on the Moon. We would like to call it Carroll.”

They held each other for a long time after that.

A bright spot on the moon, visible to her children, bears her name now. It will outlast all of us.

And then Koch, crossing into the moon’s gravitational pull at 12.37 in the morning, radioed down:

“We are now falling to the moon rather than rising away from Earth.”

Four years ago, I wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope unfurling into space – how it felt to watch human beings aim their finest inventions not at each other, but outward, into the oldest questions of our origins, with nothing behind it but awe.

Webb looked out. Artemis carried us there.

Four bodies, breathing, grieving, pressing their faces to the glass of a spacecraft they named Integrity.

Apollo came first, planted flags in her territory – bleached white by 50 years of radiation, indistinguishable now from surrender.

Now, Artemis: the huntress, lunar, wild, sovereign, who protected the untamed and punished those who violated the sacred. In the Chinese tradition, Chang’e stole immortality and fled to the Moon. She lives there still.

Hansen carried the Seven Sacred Teachings of the Anishinaabe people to the moon on his mission patch: respect, love, courage, humility, honesty, wisdom, truth – created by Henry Guimond of Sagkeeng First Nation, who never imagined his work would travel this far.

Carl Sagan wrote: “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

Not observers. Not inheritors. Something stranger and more fragile than that.

To be, briefly, improbably awake. Awake enough to beam a dead commander’s voice across the void, to name a crater for a woman who didn’t make it, to press our faces against the glass and photograph everyone we have ever loved – everyone who has ever lived – in a single frame.

While below us, the body count climbs. We keep the kill board and the star map in the same week. We always have.

Small men keep making war in the background.

The huntress goes anyway – carrying what remains of us that has not forgotten how to look up.