The NASA Artemis II Mission Is a Rare Hopecore Moment for the Girls
As astronaut Christina Koch prepared to board NASA’s Artemis II mission to the Moon, she said goodbye to her husband by placing her hands inside a heart. This gesture, which has become more popular in recent years thanks to Taylor Swift’s speech Eras the tour was simple. But the girls who got it got it.
It was just one of many small moments in the historic Moon mission that felt like a celebration of womanhood here on Earth.
There are the celebratory images from Mission Control, in which almost all of the clapping and smiling scientists are women. There is the Artemis plush toy, the cat version of Sailor Moonoccupying pride of place among the computers guiding astronauts in space. There’s the fact that a lot of the time when you watch the live stream of the mission, the voices communicating are women.
There’s the time mission commander Reid Wiseman shouted to his daughters, Katey and Ellie, on the ground and made the same heart with his hands while showing off his Swift-inspired friendship bracelets. “Copy the hearts, copy the bracelets,” the woman in mission control told him.
And when the crew announced that they had chosen to name a previously unknown crater on the moon after Wiseman’s late wife, who died of cancer in 2020, there wasn’t a dry eye in the Artemis II or on the ground.
“It’s a bright spot on the Moon,” said fellow astronaut Jeremy Hansen, “and we’d like to name it Carroll.”
In many ways, NASA’s Artemis II mission reflects the progress American society has made since we last sent a crew of astronauts on a mission to the Moon in 1972. The Apollo missions were all white men, 24 in total (although mathematician Katherine Johnson was a key player in the missions to Earth). With the Artemis mission, Koch became the first woman to venture into deep space and circumnavigate the moon; his colleague, Victor Glover, is the first black man to do the same.
But the first are not limited to astronauts. Several women who played key roles in the launch are also making history in their roles, including Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first female launch director, and Vanessa Wyche, the first black female director of the Johnson Space Center.
Photos from Mission Control show how many women are behind the success of Artemis II. Female astronauts Chris Birch and Jenni Gibbons can be seen on headset talking to the crew, while public affairs officer Leah Cheshier Mustachio hosts the live stream on YouTube. Kiarre Dumas, an exploring scientist, went viral on social media after viewers watching the broadcast criticized her chic braids and glasses, dubbing her a “badass space woman.”
“I cried when I saw her,” one woman wrote on Threads.
NASA
