Just 14 days ago, amid the mundanity of East Coast commutes and West Coast alarm clocks, NASA’s Artemis II mission gave humans across the nation and around the world a stunning new image of our planet.
In it, a crescent of Earth’s blue vitality hovers amid the blackness of space, above a high-definition brownish gray wasteland of lunar craters. It’s an eerily familiar recreation of the iconic “Earthrise” photograph from 1968’s Apollo 8, a mission with a similar flight path to Artemis II that came amid a troubled moment for Earth that many also say feels familiar today. The original “Earthrise” was just one of hundreds of thousands photographs taken during the 11 crewed Apollo missions, but it has, over the decades, become laden with symbolism about humanity and our relationship with space and our planet.
“What’s been fascinating about Artemis II is that we’ve seen many of these overarching narratives about spaceflight return—how space exploration helps us understand how we’re connected, how we share the planet, how beautiful but vulnerable our planet is,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
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Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” image, captured in 1968.
The Apollo Era
On Apollo 8’s launch day, human spaceflight was less than a decade old, and no one had seen the Earth from beyond orbit. When the trio of astronauts zipped around the far side of the moon and saw their home planet sparkling above its barren surface—even though they had known to expect the moment—they were spellbound.
It was a response repeated on each subsequent mission, says Catherine Newell, a historian of religion and science at the University of Miami, who has written a book about space exploration. “Almost every Apollo astronaut came back to Earth a fundamentally changed person,” she says. “It really shook them to their core in a spiritual way to see Earth just kind of hovering there by itself in the void.”
A sense of that experience translated to the billions of humans back on Earth through the images astronauts captured of our planet, particularly “Earthrise” and Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble” photograph (the first image captured by an astronaut that showed Earth’s full disk suspended in space).
The “Blue Marble” image, the first astronaut-captured full view of Earth’s disk from space.
Between these two missions and their iconic photographs was the first Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, 1970. On that day, a loosely organized network of celebrations, protests and teach-ins tapped into decades of growing interest in land and wildlife conservation and concerns about pollution and overpopulation. At the time, environmental initiatives were popular across the political spectrum, says Keith Woodhouse, an environmental historian at Northwestern University. “There was more of a sense back then that environmentalism was a commonsense idea, because who would object to clean water, clean air, forests and pretty places?”
As the environmental movement developed, it adopted the images of Earth from space—thanks in part to NASA’s own efforts to communicate how the agency’s Earth science research was related to phenomena such as the ozone hole and climate change, says Neil Maher, an environmental historian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “By collecting global scientific data and then combining it with these incredible images of Earth,” he says, “they turned images from space into environmental symbols.” By the 1990s the “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” images were all over environmental demonstrations.
The Artemis Era
The Artemis II crew were the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit since 1972. They followed Apollo’s path but with a modern understanding of what their home planet faced.
During the long trek back to Earth, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reminded viewers that appreciating and tending Earth doesn’t require the journey of a lifetime. “The perspective I launched with was that we live on a fragile planet in the void of space,” he told a reporter during a news conference. “We know this from science. We’re very fortunate to live on planet Earth.”
Like their predecessors, the Artemis II astronauts were unable to look away from their home planet. “What struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth,” NASA astronaut Christina Koch—who credits her career to the poster of “Earthrise” that hung on the wall of her childhood bedroom—said after returning home. “It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat, hanging undisturbed in the universe.”
The morning after Koch and her crewmates flew around the moon, the White House released “Earthset,” the recreation of Apollo 8’s iconic view. The new name reflected the mission’s trajectory—but it was also, perhaps, an accidentally apt metaphor, Maher says.
Although the pollution that inspired the Apollo era to rally for the environment is largely under control, decades of politicization have left humanity struggling to respond to the newer and more existential threat of climate change, Woodhouse says.
Maher sees that represented in “Earthset.” “It perfectly captures this cultural moment where we’re facing the most important global crisis in human history, which is climate change, and there are people out there who are ignoring this science and this catastrophe, and the Earth is imperiled because of that,” he says.
He also worries that science at NASA is in dark times, noting that critics have complained about the limited scientific motivation for the Artemis program and that the agency’s science division is facing a 50 percent funding cut in the White House budget proposal for the second year in a row (although Congress is likely to keep funding more or less steady).
In NASA’s space science, Woodhouse sees the modern equivalent of the 19th-century experience of the “sublime” that inspired the earliest environmentalists. “It’s this combination of fear and awe often associated with mountains,” he says—but now that mountains have become mundane, spectacular images of space are one of the few sights that can conjure the feeling.
During the Artemis II lunar flyby, the astronauts experienced a nearly hour-long total eclipse, the first time humans have seen such an event from near the moon. “No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us,” NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman said during the eclipse. “It is absolutely spectacular, surreal.” He might as well have called it sublime.
Although it’s too early to know whether the new Artemis photographs will continue the environmental legacy of their predecessors, they have already brought that experience of the sublime back to Earth for a new generation.
“We’ve all seen ‘Earthrise’ and the ‘Blue Marble’ images a zillion times, so their power to really shake us out of the ruts of daily life is profoundly diminished,” Woodhouse says. The new images, perhaps, still can. “It’s hard not to think about the fragility of planet Earth when you see those photos.”
