My intention for this week’s column was to write something positive, something hopeful, to find a topic that might admit of something other than the cynicism, foreboding and despair that have increasingly come to characterise our world. And the prime candidate is Nasa’s Artemis II mission, the first manned lunar flight since the last of the Apollo missions, Apollo 17, in 1972.

Artemis II, which took the four crew members of the Orion spacecraft on a fly-by around the moon, could in one sense be seen as a mere reboot of a once-beloved blockbuster franchise fallen into disrepair. But it is also, in its own right, a historic moment – not least because the crew, in circling around the far side of the moon, have now officially travelled the farthest from Earth any humans have ever gone.

There are other records, too. Commander Reid Wiseman is, at 50, the oldest human to travel beyond low earth orbit. The pilot, Victor Glover, is the first black man to travel to the moon and the first to leave low earth orbit. Mission specialist, Christina Koch, is the first woman. Canadian Jeremy Hansen is the first non-American. There is something surprising, and even a little uplifting, in the knowledge that humanity – and let’s give the devil his due here, the US government – is still capable of pulling off such a tremendous human and technological feat.

And then there are the photographs that have been sent back to Earth by the crew aboard the Orion. There are haunting depictions of the dark side of the moon, vast and alien and entirely devoid of life. Looking at these, I was put in mind of Buzz Aldrin’s impromptu description of the lunar surface he had just stepped on to as a “magnificent desolation” – a phrase that has always struck me as more memorable and more authentically poetic than his colleague Neil........

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