Splashdown. Now Comes The Greatest Danger

Apollo astronauts suffered much after their lunar encounter. Will those on Artemis?

Image: Dante experiences the vertiginous overview effect, by Sandro Botticelli

My third year undergraduate physics project was to measure the heights of mountains on the Moon. I didn’t get to go to the Moon, but, instead, had to take the best photographs I could through the university telescopes and calculate the heights from the lengths of shadows.

The project has stuck in my imagination, not because of the science, which, trust me, had vanishingly small value, but because the experience was tremendous, even spiritual. I could half-kid myself that I had visited the Moon, or at least had had a very good look. And that changed me.

The astronauts on Artemis II have returned to Earth safely. But the end of their journey from the far side of the Moon also marks the beginning of another. You can’t come close to another world and remain unaffected. And, if the astronauts from the Apollo missions are anything to go by, working out what just happened will not be straightforward.

One or two of their predecessors had epiphanies. But more suffered serious difficulties. “I wondered whether the Moonwalkers had reconciled themselves to being Earthbound; whether they'd made peace with their world or continued to mourn their strangled hopes,” writes Andrew Smith in his book-length exploration of the impact of the overwhelming experience, Moondust.

It’s a gripping, sad read. Neil Armstrong was afflicted by depression. Buzz Aldrin and Charlie Duke succumbed to alcohol. Al Bean became an artist with one subject on repeat: lunar scenes. Jack Schmitt turned to politics before becoming a climate sceptic, and David Scott faced disgrace by scandal. Differently, there is Ed Mitchell who devoted the rest of his life to researching cosmic intelligence.

The voyagers partly had to deal with fame but more importantly what is sometimes called the overview effect. Seeing the Earth as a blue-green ball floating in the velvet blackness of space provokes feelings of awe that can be both amazing and troubling. Connection with humanity may follow, but so might anxiety about the alarming fragility of things. But there is a resource to draw on.

The overview effect is not limited to astronauts. Many spiritual writers have contemplated the impact of viewing their lives from the vantage of the heavens - not in a spacecraft, but in their imaginations. And there’s a lesson they teach.

One such figure is Dante Alighieri, the writer of the Divine Comedy. He looks down on Earth in the third part of his epic poem, the Paradiso, and says that, from the cosmic viewpoint he has reached, his home planet seems like a puny threshing-floor.

Dante is partly saying that the conflicts that had seemed so important to him, now don’t. But he was also saying that he has discovered another dimension from which to embrace life.

That other dimension is the divine perspective. Dante discovers an anti-fragile viewpoint that can absorb any and all of mortal life’s shocks.

Put it like this. The overview effect can both inspire and frighten, spark bombast and point to wider horizons. But there is an inner, eternal space needed to embrace well what journeys into outer space might show those who go.

The Artemis II flyby has been stunning and it’s good the astronauts have returned safely. Now I wish them the heavenly viewpoint that so helps when making contact with other worlds.

If our species does indeed become multiplanetary, cultivating the old perception that there is another world, also here, will help ground us.