The Far Side of the Moon — and What We’re Only Beginning to See

This week, humanity did something extraordinary.

For the first time in more than half a century, human beings traveled around the far side of the moon. The astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — flew farther from Earth than any person in history, reaching a distance of 252,756 miles. And in doing so, they saw something no human being had ever seen with their own eyes: the hidden face of the moon.

It turns out, it looks unfamiliar.

“The darker parts just aren’t quite in the right place,” astronaut Christina Koch said from inside the Orion capsule. “Something about you senses that is not the moon that I’m used to seeing.”

That moment of disorientation is worth sitting with. We are deeply attached to what we recognize. We build our sense of reality around what is familiar. And yet, just beyond our line of sight, there is always another side — equally real, but unseen.

Two Sides to Everything

Every system — scientific, personal, historical — has both a visible layer and a hidden one. What we see is not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)