In the beginning, Artemis II was about science. The mission, which ended on Friday with a clean splash into the Pacific Ocean, carried four astronauts who gathered data, took photographs and tested life support systems as they orbited the moon.
But for the astronauts themselves, and millions of people who checked in on them from hundreds of thousands of miles away, the mission also elicited meditations on more profound matters.
“You just look up and feel wonder, grandeur and smallness at the same time,” said Jim Davis, a pastor in Orlando, Fla. He was having dinner at a restaurant with a small group from his church when the mission launched on April 1. The group stepped out into the parking lot to admire the rocket blasting upward into the early evening sky.
For 10 days, people admired the vastness of the universe. The frailty and interdependence of the human species. The sheer awesomeness of the moon.
“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, reported to mission control this week. “It lasted just a second or two, and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.”
For many people back home on Earth, the mission was a brief reminder of the sheer scale of outer space, and a prompt to contemplate both our power and our powerlessness. It turned all of us into children at camp, lying supine and looking up at the stars, thinking very big thoughts.
It’s a paradox that scientists, philosophers and poets have tried to capture for centuries.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” a writer of the Book of Psalms asked of God.
“When I search for the numerous turning spirals of the stars, I no longer have my feet on the Earth, but am beside Zeus himself,” reads a text attributed to the second-century astronomer Ptolemy.
Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”
He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”
For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse.
Ron Garan watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 as a small boy with his family, and was struck by the sense that “we had just become a different species.” For millenniums of human history, all life on Earth was constrained there. Then suddenly the rules changed, the boundaries expanded.
Mr. Garan grew up to become an astronaut who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2011. In space, he was overwhelmed by the realization that everyone on Earth is also in space already, together.
Now back on solid ground and working as a consultant and writer, he attributes the emotional impact of space travel in part to the phenomenon of weightlessness. If a person is sitting on a beach looking at the sunset, or is perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gravity attaches them to the scene they are admiring, Mr. Garan said.
“But when I was in space, for the first time in my life, I was outside the frame of the masterpiece looking in,” he said. “That changes everything.”
Mr. Garan compared space travel to a psychedelic experience (though he declined to say whether he knew this first hand). Astronauts over the years have described crying, worshiping God and experiencing utterly new feelings of almost disembodied awe while in space.
When the Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell was on his way back from the moon in 1971, he was overwhelmed by the thought that “the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars,” he later told an interviewer. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy.”
Back on Earth, he researched various spiritual traditions to try to understand the experience and eventually found a term in Sanskrit that captured it: savikalpa samadhi, a state of deep meditation.
The Artemis II astronauts seemed at times to be undergoing similarly mind-expanding realignments of reality.
“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” pilot Victor Glover mused in an interview with CBS News on Easter Sunday. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”
Skeptics question whether the overview effect is anything more than a passing emotion.
Space travel remains a highly unusual human experience. Private space travel companies, like Blue Origin until recently, have taken dozens of tourists on brief flights above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles above Earth. Traveling farther, to Earth orbit and beyond, is still out of reach for all but government-sponsored astronauts and the wealthiest space tourists.
The growing list of people who have technically gone to space includes billionaires like Jeff Bezos, pop stars like Katy Perry and space-coded celebrities like William Shatner, who concluded that the “vicious coldness” of space contrasted with Earth’s warmth and filled him with “overwhelming sadness.”
But celestial epiphanies have always been accessible to those who can’t physically travel outside Earth’s atmosphere.
“Since the dawn of our species, every human society has looked up at the stars,” said Jo Marchant, the author of “The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars.”
Stargazing has influenced religion, philosophy, art, science and politics. Isaac Newton’s discovery that laws of motion and gravity affect everything equally influenced democratic beliefs that kings to commoners should be subject to the same rules, Ms. Marchant said.
With the encroachments of light pollution and screen-based distractions, human beings in the 21st century arguably spend less of their time contemplating the night sky than ever before.
Troy D. Allan was an Army chaplain in Afghanistan when he began intentionally spending time outside at night. He knew little about astronomy or constellations, but found that simply staring up into the sky helped him find peace in a period of his life otherwise marked by turmoil.
Mr. Allan now heads a program at Utah State University that facilitates camping trips for teenagers and others to contemplate the night sky, and their place underneath it. His campers set up their tents, then lie back and watch the stars come out. At first, time moves slowly for young people accustomed to clicking through life at the pace of TikTok. But gradually, they warm to the experience.
“What happens to humans when we encounter vastness, silence, beauty and mystery?” Mr. Allan said. “It’s the recalibrating of our lives.”
After the stars come out, Mr. Allan’s group goes on a hike, with the Milky Way stretched like a banner above them. Then they stop again for a long time and look up.
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
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