For 40 minutes, the greatest solitude humans have known

The crescent-shaped Earth—our oasis that held all we held dear, now a mere dot in endless darkness—seemed to kiss the jagged lunar surface. As the Moon slowly disappeared, thousands of scars of the Moon were reflected on the Earth.

“I actually shudder just thinking about it right now,” the Artemis II Commander said. Reid Wiseman speaks to The Times while still in space on Wednesday evening (Earth time). “It was an incredible sight and then it was gone.”

In the dim green light of their spacecraft, with no more room to maneuver than a Sprinter van, the four-man crew entered a profound loneliness few experience. Farther from Earth than any human in history, the crew could no longer reach Mission Control, their families, or any living member of our planet.

For 40 minutes on Monday, it was just them, their high-tech lifeboat and the moon.

The crew members took a break from their rigorous scientific observations for just three or four minutes to let the surreal feeling sink in. They shared some maple cookies brought by astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Canadian Space Agency and Artemis II mission specialist.

We humans eat seven fish on Christmas Eve, samosas on Eid-al-Fitr, and maple cookies behind the moon.

But the astronauts still had work to do. NASA wanted to observe the far side of the moon, forever facing away from Earth, with a highly advanced device that the agency rarely has the opportunity to measure this view: the human eye.

The moon, appearing the size of a bowling ball at arm’s length to the crew, hung suspended in nothingness. In complete silence, he called.

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Artemis II pilot Victor Glover heard the terminator’s call: the boundary between the day and night of the moon – the dawn of the moon. Here, the sun casts sharp, dramatic shadows across the moon’s sheer cliffs, rugged waves, and seemingly bottomless craters.

Small craters on the dayside are scattered and proudly reflect sunlight, like pinholes on a lampshade, Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch said. Hansen was impressed by the beautiful shades of blue, green and brown that the surface reveals when you are patient enough.

Even though Earth was hidden behind the moon a quarter of a million miles away, the crew couldn’t help but think of home.

For Koch, this desolation was only a reminder of how much the Earth provides us: water, air, warmth, food. Glover could feel the love radiating from our pale blue dot that defied distance. Hansen considered Earth’s gravity as he tried to pull the crew home.

But still, the crew was in the Moon’s gravity arena, where gravity dominated that of the Earth. It was the lunar monolith in front of them that gently guided the little living containers around the natural satellite and towards their home.

Finally the house peaked out from behind the dark sphere.

The moon, as seen by the Artemis II crew, completely blocks the sun. From the crew’s perspective, the moon appears large enough to completely block out the sun, creating a totality of approximately 54 minutes.

(NASA)

As a final show, or perhaps a farewell, the moon temporarily blocked out the sun: a lunar eclipse.

“We’ve seen some great simulations done by our lunar science team, but when this actually happened it blew us all away,” Glover said. “It was one of the greatest gifts.”