One week after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean and breaking the record for the farthest distance humans have ever travelled from Earth, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman asked for a Navy chaplain. He had never met the man before. When the chaplain walked in and Wiseman saw the cross on his collar, he wept.

"I'm not really a religious person," Wiseman said publicly, "but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or experience anything."

View of Earth that language couldn't hold

The Artemis II mission crewed by Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen carried its four astronauts further from Earth than any humans before them. What they saw on the way defied easy description.

Witnessing the sun being eclipsed by the moon, Wiseman remarked to Glover in the middle of their mission, “I don't think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now.” Jeremy Hansen, a mission specialist, revealed that he was constantly returning to the windows because of the realisation that he was so infinitesimally small within the vastness of the galaxy.

They were also able to witness the earth setting behind the moon, something humans have never had the pleasure of seeing before.

This has a label: the Overview Effect. The term refers to a documented change in cognition experienced by astronauts when observing the Earth from space, and is characterised by immediate awe, a feeling of unity with everything and everyone else, and a deeper awareness of how fragile the Earth is.

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell who became the sixth Moon astronaut described his experience after his 1971 mission with the statement "You develop an instant global consciousness a people orientation an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it." The Artemis II crew members currently use the same words which they have found.

It is not the only adjustment, though. According to Christina Koch, her body still wasn't ready to accept the presence of gravity in the first few days after landing. "Every time I woke up I thought I was floating," Koch said. "I truly thought I was floating and had to convince myself I wasn't." Koch threw a shirt away, expecting it to float in the air, but was surprised when it fell down.

All this aside, the astronauts have apparently been sleeping great. The tests that the crew underwent right after landing have given them little opportunity to reflect on their experience. "We've not had that decompression," Wiseman admitted. "We've not had that reflection time."

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