The astronaut Victor Glover, pilot of the NASA Artemis II mission, sent an Easter message to Earth from the Orion capsule while the crew is en route to the Moon.
Glover invited humanity to reflect on unity, regardless of religious beliefs, reported Fox News.
"Whether you celebrate it or not, believe in God or not, this is an opportunity to remember where we are, who we are, that we are the same, and that we must overcome it together," said the astronaut.
Glover also provided a powerful image to the network CBS News to put the crew's journey into perspective: "You talk to us because we are in a spaceship very far from Earth, but you are on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe."
From a distance, the astronaut described the planet as an oasis in the vastness of the cosmos: "Perhaps the distance makes us seem special, but we are at the same distance from you, and believe me, you are special in all this emptiness."
The message was compared by specialized media such as Space.com to the historic broadcast by the Apollo 8 crew on Christmas Eve of 1968, when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders read the first verses of Genesis from lunar orbit to millions of viewers.
Artemis II was launched last Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and is the first crewed mission to travel near the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972, more than 53 years ago.
The crew consists of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Glover, specialist Christina Koch —the first woman on a crewed lunar mission— and Canadian Jeremy Hansen, the first citizen of that country to travel to the Moon.
Glover also achieves another milestone: he is the first Afro-descendant to travel near the Moon, after having been the first African American astronaut on a long-duration mission to the International Space Station between 2020 and 2021.
The mission will not land on the Moon but will conduct a flyby to test the systems of the Orion crew capsule, aiming to surpass the distance record set by Apollo 13, reaching approximately 406,773 kilometers from Earth.
The crew's return is scheduled for April 10, with landing in the Pacific Ocean, near San Diego, after seven days and twenty hours of mission.
Filed under: