This Artemis moon mission is a truly unifying international project, one of the few we have left | Christopher Riley

Mr.More than 50 years ago, photographs of Earth seen from the Moon by Apollo astronauts had a shock effect on a society distracted by division and conflict. Then as now, they came “in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance,” as President John F. Kennedy said. But what he didn’t foresee was that by going to the Moon, we would discover the Earth.

Here was our home planet, suddenly seen as a finite ball of rock, enveloped in a thin layer of air suitable for life, like an apple skin. This view is at odds with the daily experience of people who live on the surface of a seemingly infinite world with unlimited resources. Creating a Special Earth Day soon followed, with the creation of the campaigning environmental charity Friends of the Earth And the adoption of a series of laws on environmental protection.

And for a brief moment, as the first moonwalkers traveled the world, everyone who greeted them referred to their accomplishment as something “we” had done – “we, the human race,” instead of an American feat.

In the decades since, no human has traveled far enough to see Earth from such a humble perspective. Human spaceflight has instead focused on observations of Earth from a series of space stations located approximately 250 miles up; only a thousandth of the distance from which the Apollo astronauts had seen it. It’s not far enough to see the entire Earth, or to feel the precarious and limited nature of our planet’s habitability.

The images that united and inspired a generation in the 1960s and 1970s evoke little emotion in us today. Instead of marveling at the miracle of Google Earth, with its superbly indexed global data layers and up-to-date imagery, we have become complacent. At the recent sold-out Secret Maps exhibition at the British Library, one of these globes, projected next to the exit, appeared almost invisible to visitors. “Oh, it’s just Google Earth,” I heard a man say to his friend as he walked past him dismissively.

The borderless and unifying feeling of our world as a single global community that fascinated us after Apollo and that could have brought us all together to act together for greater environmental good, could have been amplified by social media. Instead, the profit-driven, algorithm-powered echo chambers of these platforms have pushed many of us in the opposite direction. Instead of fighting for the habitability of our home, we fight against each other; our minds are occupied by divisive and polarizing politics and broken international relations.

Today, four of us once again ventured far from our divided planet. This international team of calm, curious, kind and thoughtful people represents the best of us. They symbolize something important. They will board a spacecraft built by communities from 11 countries who harnessed their inherent diversity of thought and broader problem-solving abilities to realize a new lunar project. Instead of individual nations rushing there, the Artemis missions represent a group of united nations heading to the Moon together, first to fly around the Moon this week with Artemis II and then to land there in 2028. Sixty-one countries have signed the Artemis Accords, a set of global agreements pledging to work together peacefully in space and on the Moon.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch, who will be the first woman to fly around the Moon, told us while filming with the team for our immersive film The Moonwalkers.. “Any country interested in exploring, come, come, be a part of it. Mission commander Reid Wiseman agreed. “We are going there as humanity,” he said. Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover, who is expected to be the first African American to fly to the Moon, said that “one of the things that going to space teaches you is that we’re all brothers and sisters, and when we work together to accomplish really difficult things, it brings you together in a way that nothing else can.”

The first Artemis astronauts will travel more than 4,000 miles beyond the Moon before its gravity pulls them back. As it passes back in front of the Moon, the Earth will emerge from behind it. Unlike the first Apollo astronauts, who did not expect this view, rushing to document it and marvel at it, the Artemis II crew plans to photograph it. They might even try to broadcast the scene to us live.

As the first humans for more than half a century prepare to set their eyes on the entire Earth, they are on the verge of experiencing something almost sacred. Sharing this experience will change them more than they can imagine. But maybe knowing there are other people up there looking back from so far away will change us too. It will remind us to see ourselves as the poet Archibald MacLeish did after seeing the first photos of Apollo 8, “like horsemen on Earth together, on this luminous beauty in the eternal cold.”

On the lunar surface, a few thousand miles below them, as the Artemis astronauts pass over the Moon, will be a tiny silicon disk containing messages of goodwill from world leaders, placed there by the Apollo 11 crew in July 1969. One of them came from a man called Eric Williams, then prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. It reads: “Humanity sincerely hopes that even if we gain the moon, we will not lose the world. »

• Dr Christopher Riley is the author of the book Where Once We Stood and co-author of The Moonwalkers with Tom Hanks, starring the crew of Artemis II, currently on view at Lightroom London.