Here is a sentence that was true for the first time in over fifty years: four people are on their way around the Moon.
Not on the way to a landing, not in a movie, not in an old grainy broadcast from 1972. In April 2026, the crew of Artemis II climbed into the Orion spacecraft, lit the engine, and swung out on a great looping arc around the far side of the Moon and back — the first humans to make that trip since Apollo 17. And they came home with more than 7,000 photographs. 🌑
The crew (and a small pile of firsts)
Onboard were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and — flying for Canada — Jeremy Hansen. Between the four of them they quietly rewrote a stack of record books: Koch became the first woman to travel to the Moon’s neighborhood, Glover the first Black astronaut, and Hansen the first Canadian. After half a century of the Moon being a place we used to go, four humans went again — and this time the crew looked a lot more like everybody.
The part where the Moon eclipses the Sun
Now the bit that stops you in your tracks.
We all know a solar eclipse from the ground: the Moon drifts between us and the Sun, and for a couple of minutes the daylight goes strange and cathedral-quiet. But the Artemis II crew got the version almost nobody in history has seen — because they were the ones doing the flying, and the Moon was right there beside them.
As Orion swept past, the Moon slid between the spacecraft and the Sun. From the window, the crew watched the very world they were rounding rise up and cover the Sun — a solar eclipse where the eclipsing Moon wasn’t a distant disc but a landscape scrolling past just outside the glass. 🌑☀️
A solar eclipse is beautiful from your backyard. Imagine seeing one where the Moon doing the eclipsing is close enough to photograph out the window.
About that “far side”
Let’s be precise, because the truth is cool enough without stretching it. Apollo crews had already seen the Moon’s far side with their own eyes decades ago, so Artemis II isn’t the first time humans laid eyes on it. What is new: for the first time in over fifty years, human beings looped behind that hidden hemisphere in person, cameras running — and NASA has been releasing the 7,000-plus images they captured for anyone on Earth to page through.
For a stretch of that loop, with the Moon’s bulk between them and home, the crew even lost radio contact with Earth entirely. Four people, briefly the most genuinely out-of-touch humans alive — and then Orion came back around the limb, the signal returned, and the photos started flowing home. 📡
Why this is on a good-news blog
Because the world went back. After fifty years of “we did that once,” a rocket lifted off, four people rode it around the Moon, and they didn’t just prove the hardware works — they leaned to the window like anyone would and took seven thousand pictures, the way you’d photograph anything you couldn’t quite believe you were seeing.
And they came home with the strangest souvenir: a solar eclipse witnessed from the outside, the Moon and the Sun lined up for an audience of four, hanging in the dark. We are, it turns out, still the kind of species that flings people at the Moon just to look — and then shares every photo with the rest of us. 🌑💛
