I was just a little girl when the first man landed on the moon. We did not have a television set at home and there certainly was no internet. It was perhaps through hearing my parents talk about newspaper articles, or listening to the news on the radio at dinner time, that the event made its impact. For a while, my best friend Satya Rao and I gave up our dolls to play astronauts, with make-believe landings and flights of wonder.

From then to now, I cannot even begin to imagine what it must mean to millions of girls, and boys, to watch Artemis II on its 10-day voyage, flying 406,771 km from earth, the farthest ever for human space travel. This time, however, the imagination it sparks is different. It’s no longer just about going into space but about who gets to lead the journey.

What does it mean for an Artemis generation to watch the most astonishing photographs taken by human hands of our planet and of the far side of the moon, including a stunning April 6 shot of the earth setting behind the moon, a counterfoil to Apollo 8’s iconic 1968 earthrise?

After being bombarded by heads of state as they justify war and threaten civilisational destruction, what a relief it is to listen to the poetry of pilot Victor Glover’s impromptu Easter-Day message: “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 [in] together.”

The counter to a polarised, fractured world is to witness four humans bond in space. Glover is the first African-American to head to the moon and Christina Koch, the first woman to fly there. Together with Canadian Jeremy Hansen and American commander Reid Wiseman, they stand as a rebuke to Donald Trump’s declared war on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as they reflect the importance of international collaboration in a mission that includes a European Space Agency service module.

When Hansen, on the line with mission control, suggested that one of the previously unrecorded craters be named Carroll, after commander Wiseman’s wife, a pediatric nurse who died of cancer in 2020, we saw the power of that human connection. “A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one…her name was Carroll,” Hansen said, his voice breaking as the four reached out to embrace in their weightless home.

Hidden figures to leaders

It took nine years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, for NASA to select its first female astronaut candidate in 1978. In 2026, nine of Artemis’s 18 astronauts are women and the Artemis 4 mission, scheduled for 2028, is expected to land the first woman on the moon.

From the outset, the Artemis mission has been inclusive by design. Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon, is after all the twin sister of Apollo.

Christina Koch, the first woman to venture into deep space and fly around the moon, is no rookie. The 47-year-old electrical engineer who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013 holds the record at 328 days for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. This is not token inclusion but recognition of merit and a place earned.

Challenge of collective action

Women held other notable leadership positions, including launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and Vanessa Wych, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the first Black woman to lead it. If the Apollo 11 mission had just one woman sitting on the launch console, 30% at the Artemis II launch console were women.

Even the spacesuit has evolved. As recently as 2019, the first all-female spacewalk from the International Space Station had to be cancelled because only one medium-sized spacewalk-ready suit was available, as reported by NPR. The 2026 Artemis spacesuits designed by Axiom Space, offer greater flexibility and mobility and come in different sizes to fit a wider range of crew members. This is what inclusion by design and intention looks like.

The Artemis mission represents a generational shift from hidden figures to leadership roles for women. It’s a role that India has proudly played up with the appointment of Ritu Karidhal Srivastava as mission director of Chandrayaan 3.

Set against a series of failures to land on the moon from Israel to Japan, Srivastava put together a team of 54 women scientists and engineers, including Kalpana Kalahasti as associate project director. Along with scientists like Tessy Thomas and Nandini Harinath, the team became popularly known as the “rocket women” of India, the ones who were able to complete a successful lunar landing on August 2023.

That mission, like the Artemis mission, was about more than making new scientific breakthroughs. These contemporary missions are determined to send a message—women’s leadership and place in the universe. By going to space, women are proving they have a place right here on earth, and beyond.

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