There’s something about the hum of the cooling fans in the background of a live feed that reminds you just how fragile space travel actually is. Victor Glover, the pilot for the Artemis II mission, caught everyone a bit off guard this weekend when he was asked about celebrating Easter while hurtling away from Earth. He didn’t have a script—actually, he said he had nothing prepared at all—but what he said stuck.
He talked about looking out the window at the Earth, seeing it not as a collection of borders or nations, but as a single, solitary object. It’s that old ‘pale blue dot’ perspective, but coming from someone who is currently thousands of miles away, it hits differently. He called the Earth a ‘spaceship’ that was designed to hold us all, which is a pretty wild way to frame our existence in a universe that is, by and large, just empty space.
Sometimes I wonder if we lose that perspective down here on the ground. Glover seemed to think so. He kept coming back to the idea that we are all on this together, which sounds like a cliché, sure, but he was genuinely trying to drive the point home. You’re on a spaceship, he was saying. Or maybe we all are, just in different ways.
It’s a strange thing to think about while you’re eating your breakfast—this crew is out there, millions of miles away, and they’re busy hiding dehydrated scrambled egg ‘eggs’ around their cabin to celebrate. Christina Koch mentioned it with a laugh, noting that they were pretty happy with the results. It’s a human moment in a decidedly inhuman environment. They’re essentially living in a pressurized tin can, yet they’re still trying to keep traditions alive.
The crew, which includes Reid Wiseman, Jeremy Hansen, and Koch, are doing something nobody has done since ’72. They are on that long, lonely loop around the moon. Hansen echoed the sentiment of his crewmate, boiling the whole thing down to the simple, universal idea of love. It’s a bit of a shift, moving from the technical reality of space flight to the philosophical, but that’s the nature of being out there, I guess.
They’re just four people in a vacuum, looking back at us. Whether you believe in the holiday or the theology behind it, there’s a quiet weight to the idea of a shared oasis. We’re all we’ve got, right? Or maybe that’s just too simple. Either way, they’re still out there, floating along.