At dawn on Easter Day, the Artemis II spacecraft was more than 330,000 km away from our home planet.

It was just then leaving the zone where satellite links are provided by the Near Space Network to enter the zone where they have to use the Deep Space Network (which, in turn, will cease to function when the craft goes round behind the Moon).

The crew – consisting of Americans Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman and Canadian Jeremy Hansen – could therefore count on a fairly smooth communication with Earth, with a delay of less than two seconds.

Thus, during a press conference, a journalist asked Victor Glover:‘I have a question for you. “Apollo 8 had a memorable Christmas Eve reading from Genesis. Do you have a message you’d like to share from space about Easter Sunday?”

The first African-American on a lunar mission, caught off guard, improvised on the spot a response that could not have been less constructed.

“You know, I don’t have anything prepared. I…I….uhm…I’m glad you brought that up, though. I think these observances are important, and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at, you know, the beauty of creation, I think that… For me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing. And, you know, when I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created, it’s y- you, you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you, and I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about, you know, all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, um, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we gotta get through this together“.

On Sunday, Jeremy Hansen then sent a more studied and institutional, but no less interesting Easter greeting to the Earth:

“We were talking up here as a crew, and we wanted to send a special Easter message on this day”, he said. “And no matter your faith or religion, for me the teachings of Jesus were always a very simple truth of love — universal love. Love yourself and love others.
And something for us, being up here and looking back at all of you through one tiny window — that just resonates 100 percent true. And our goal as humanity should be to just follow in that example.”

Aldrin’s communion and Russian icons

The religiousness of astronauts, however, is anything but new.

The episode that took place on board Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968, when the three crew members took turns reading the first pages of the Bible narrating the Creation, is only the best known.

Moreover, it was such a solemn and heartfelt gesture that it raised a fuss on Earth: an association of militant atheists denounced NASA for allegedly violating the First Amendment, which prohibits the United States from adopting an official religion.

It seems that this is precisely why Buzz Aldrin did not let anyone know – except Neil Armstrong who was next to him – that as soon as he landed on the Moon he had taken Communion, according to the rite of the Presbyterian church to which he belonged. He had also poured a few drops of the Eucharistic wine on the lunar soil, which was thus the first terrestrial liquid ever spilled on our satellite.

These scruples of modesty and secrecy, which the Artemis II astronauts also respected by alluding to Easter as an occasion of unity among all men and to Jesus as a teacher of universal love, were obviously unknown and incomprehensible to the Russian cosmonauts.
The sacred icons in the Russian module of the International Space Station have, over the years, become a meme and have even been the subject of an anthropological study.

The love that moves the sun and the other stars

After all, what is there to be surprised about? Space travel is one of the most dangerous experiences a human being can have: the slightest distraction can result in death, and an accident can always happen regardless of human error.
Feeling ‘in God’s hands’ and with your life hanging by a thread, and feeling grateful for every single minute that everything went smoothly as long as you are up there, is natural.

On the other hand, space travel is also an immersion in the vastness and wonder of the cosmos, of such power that from down here we cannot even imagine it.
If there is anything that certainly prompts questions about what is the root cause and perhaps even the ultimate goal of existence, it is precisely ten days spent in the cosmic void, looking through a glass at celestial bodies face to face and without the filter of the atmosphere.

But the feeling that astronauts feel today, aided by a good rush of adrenalin, astronomers in general have felt throughout almost the entire history of astronomy.

Kepler littered his writings with hymns to God, understanding the study of the heavens as a praise of and approach to its creator. Newton ‘s mystical and spiritual interests are well documented.
It was an Anglican reverend, John Michell, who first hypothesised the existence of what we now call ‘black holes’, while what has been jokingly dubbed the ‘Big Bang’ was an intuition of the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître.

However, if we want to go further back than Kepler, the figure of the ecclesiastical humanist who specialised in astronomy – at that time always alongside astrology – dominates unchallenged: Copernicus, Christopher Clavius, Tycho Brahe and Nicholas Cusanus are some of the best known examples.

If we then trace the beginnings of this science back to the Franciscan magistri, and before that to the Muslims of Persia, and before that to the Pythagorean sect in Greece, and before that to the Babylonian priests, the intertwining of the study of the stars and the intimate sense of the sacred will appear tighter with every step back.

Galileo himself, who had the problems we know with the papacy, took it for granted that nature was a book of which God was the author and was subject to laws that came from a legislator.

Small but decisive

Certainly, in the last century, the concrete life of the astrophysicist has lost – for good measure – much of that heroic impetus, that hunger for discovery and that quest for the deepest mysteries of existence that originally characterised it.

Today, only the adrenalin rush of space travel can, perhaps, rekindle in a select few a sense of elevation towards the divine and an understanding of man’s smallness, combined, however, with the knowledge that man, in his own small way, is capable of going as far as the Moon and beyond, improving himself ceaselessly.

The beauty of Glover’s words lies precisely in this: it is true, the universe is boundless, but it would be a boundless nothingness, a ‘bunch of nonsense’, if we were not there to give it meaning.

Celestial bodies, in themselves, mean nothing, know nothing about themselves and are worth nothing to anyone. Except for a few inhabited planets, scattered millions of years’ journey from each other, the universe is an empty wasteland to which it would make no difference if it ceased to exist.

It is not true that the immensity of the universe shows us that we are worthless. The immensity of the universe shows us that we are worth everything.
And nowhere is it written that it is for ‘wiser’, ‘more mature’, ‘more balanced’ or ‘more rational’ people to convince us that we are worthless.

“Believe me, you are special,” said an astronaut on Easter Sunday as he sped 330,000 km from Earth.

The original meaning of astronomical knowledge, in the Christian civilisation that gave it its most extraordinary advances, was this.