Living Space

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The Morning

Living Space

We don’t have to travel to the moon to gain some of the insight that astronauts do.

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María Jesús Contreras

By

Melissa Kirsch

April 4, 2026,

6:13 a.m. ET

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Vacation photos: Instant postcards of you, your family, on the beach, or on skis, somewhere enviable. Snap the picture, post it or text it and you’ve cemented the experience — I am here right now, and now my friends and followers know, can ogle or envy or delight in my adventures. Even when we’re far away, we’re in constant contact, sending pictures, texts, voice memos, phone calls.

In a couple of days, the four astronauts of

the Artemis II mission

will fly by the far side of the moon, getting perspectives on the lunar surface that have never been observed by human eyes. And when the moon is between the spacecraft and Earth, the astronauts will be completely incommunicado for 30 to 50 minutes. No radio signals, no instructions from Mission Control, no transmissions of any kind. Once the astronauts pass beyond the moon’s visible edge, known as the lunar limb, they will be as far from Earth as humans have ever been, the least contactable people in the solar system.

Buzz Aldrin characterized the moon’s surface as “magnificent desolation.” Is there any desolation more profound to our 21st-century proclivities than a total communication blackout? While we may joke that we wish we could flee to some far-off island where no one can contact us, we know that we are always tethered to Earth, that we can get our phones from the hotel room if we need them. We may decide to be offline for a certain amount of time, but we’re in control of the duration. No matter how far we travel or how disconnected we feel, we are always grounded in certain constants: our weight on the earth, the blue sky above, twilight, the sound of the wind.

The

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen

, part of the Artemis crew, said at a news conference this week that in the lead-up to the launch, he would go out at night and look up at the moon. “I really feel like, gosh, that is really far away,” he said. “And it just gives me great appreciation for it.” He gazed up at the moon as we all do, admiring its brightness, pondering its distance with his feet planted on the ground beneath him. But he moongazed with the knowledge that he would soon be seeing it up close, that the world as the rest of us know it is only part of the picture.

The change in perspective, the feeling of awe that people experience when they see Earth from space, is called the overview effect. Astronauts speak of recognizing the beauty of the planet, a feeling of interconnectedness, a deep understanding of Earth as home. These are insights we, forever terrestrial, may understand intellectually but have a hard time truly embodying. Christina Koch, another of the astronauts on the mission, described

the phenomenon

: “You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.”

The Artemis II astronauts are the first who’ve been permitted to bring smartphones into space. Will we see selfies at Earthrise, TikToks in zero gravity? And NASA has made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to

track the crew

, celestial Find My Friends. Even in outer space, the phone abides. Here’s hoping that the astronauts will be able to capture, whether with their cameras or their consciousness, some of the insight that the

Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart

described experiencing when he looked at Earth from space:

You realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you. All of history and music and poetry and art and war and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games — all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize that that perspective has — that you’ve changed. That there’s something new there. That relationship is no longer what it was.

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