It must have been a relief. For about 40 minutes, those four astronauts were incommunicado, completely cut off from any news transmitted from Earth. 

It has been a surreal split-screen, toggling between those absurdly high-functioning, yet adorable spacefarers, beaming their astonishing photographs and goodwill back to an Earth wracked by war and suffering, energy shocks and US President Donald Trump’s cavalier threats of genocidal destruction.

What must it have been like to hear the commander of humanity’s most powerful military muse about raining death on a whole civilization, posting on social media with the menacing nonchalance of a domestic abuser operating at global scale, all while witnessing the obvious miracle of that same tiny blue globe suspended in the vast inhospitable void?

They’re astronauts after all, so they must surely have thought of Carl Sagan’s words, inspired by a picture of our miniscule speck of rock taken by Voyager 1, back in 1990: “Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot,” he wrote in Pale Blue Dot.

The Artemis II crew’s spin around the moon is a good moment to exhume the opening lines of Sagan’s reflection: “Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us,” he wrote. “On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

The Artemis astronauts didn’t go nearly as far as the........

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