This week saw humanity at its worst. Artemis II told the opposite story | Flynn Coleman

We send the voice of the dead across space as an act of continuity and care, while on Earth we tally the bodies. Which do we choose to become? Four people are sleeping 19,000 miles from the moon when the voice of Apollo 13’s commander arrives. “Hello, Artemis II. This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood.” Jim Lovell orbited the moon in 1968. He limped around it again in 1970 in a severely damaged ship, his crew kept alive by mathematics and the will to survive. He spent the rest of his life – until his death at the age of 97 – waiting for someone to go back. Last August, he recorded a message. On the morning of 6 April, mission control beamed it across the dark. Reid Wiseman woke, listened, then held something to the camera: a square of silk, the original Apollo 8 mission patch, flown to the Moon in 1968, pressed into his hands before launch by Lovell’s son. “Good luck and Godspeed,” the old man’s voice said, “from all of us here on the good Earth.” At the launch pad, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director who gave the final go-ahead, had polled her team and heard, from every console, a unanimous go. This is what it is, in 2026, to be human: to s