Welcome home: NASA astronaut Victor Glover, Artemis II pilot, left, and NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist, on the flight deck of USS John P. Murtha after splashdown, April 10, 2026.
Photographer: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images North AmericaArtemis Was a State Failure and a Human Triumph
For all its well-earned acclaim, NASA’s most recent moon mission also epitomized the worst excesses and flaws of the US space program and took risks out of proportion to its rewards.
“If the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye,” wrote Norman Mailer in his psychedelic history of the Apollo program. Whatever else one may say of the agency, its ability to produce evocative images remains unrivaled.
Artemis II, NASA’s just-concluded lunar mission, will be remembered for many things, but the photos it captured were inarguably bangers: of a crescent “earthset,” wildly polychromatic against the void of space; of a lunar eclipse of the sun; of the moon’s mottled surface, vivid and strangely inviting. And then of the all-too-dramatic splashdown on Friday, with four astronauts plonking safely into the Pacific, having traveled further than any humans in history.