IN LONG-LOST days, when Presidents of the United States spoke of God with reverence and sincerity, Ronald Reagan paid tribute to the crew of a space voyage by recalling how they had waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God”.
The Artemis II mission once again reminds us that space travel brings to the surface considerations of transcendence normally layered deep in everyday life. The vastness of the universe creates what NASA calls “the Overview Effect”: a profound experience that changes many astronauts’ perspective on the world. The sight of the earth, fragile and bright in the deep velvety darkness of space, inspires an awe which prompts thoughts about the meaning of existence.
For some astronauts, this is directly religious. James Irwin, already a committed Christian when he landed on the moon with Apollo 15 in 1971, underwent a spiritual encounter there. Faced with some troublesome equipment on the lunar surface, he sent up a prayer and was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of God’s presence — so vivid that he turned and looked over his shoulder, expecting to see that “He was standing there”.
Other space travellers are more oblique in their accounts, but experience a sense of transcendence which moves them beyond the limitations of ego, identity, or nationality to some deeper sense of humility, purpose, and trust. “From space, you realize how small and interconnected we all are,” Scott Kelly, a veteran of four US space flights, said. Viewing the earth was a “powerful experience that made me feel connected to all living things on our planet”, said Mike Massimino, who performed two spacewalks in 2002. “When you look at the earth from space, you realise . . . we are all in this together,” said Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel into space in 1992. “We are all astronauts on this spaceship Earth,” said Jean-Francois Clervoy, a French astronaut until 1999.
For many astronauts, this had practical implications. “I saw earth not as a collection of nations, but as a single entity with one destiny,” said Ron Garan, who spent 178 days on the US Space Shuttle, Russian Soyuz, and International Space Station. Global problems, such as climate change and world poverty, were the result of treating the planet as a “subsidiary of the global economy”, he wrote in 2015. Humanity needs to reverse its priorities.
Perhaps the most mystical was Edgar Mitchell, who landed Apollo 14 on the moon in 1971. His previous fear of death was quelled in “an ecstasy of unity”, in which he saw that “the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.”
His mysticism turned political, creating “an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” Even the current US President might understand language like that.
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