From Bibles to Christian songs - God was at the centre of Artemis II’s voyage to the Moon

As the Artemis II mission ventured further than humans have ever travelled, astronaut Victor Glover shared a powerful Easter message about love and unity from space. The mission revealed how faith and science can work together to explore God’s creation

It was a big week for science as the Artemis II mission launched, passed by the far side of the Moon, and successfully returned to Earth, all within a span of ten days. The mission took four astronauts 252,756 miles from Earth, the furthest we as a species have ever travelled.

The purpose of the Artemis mission, which cost an estimated $93bn, was to prepare for humans to live and work on the Moon as a precursor to establishing human settlements on Mars, and there are various suggested benefits to that. Economically, there are possibilities for mineral extraction and testing new technologies; geopolitically, there are advantages to staking a claim on valuable lunar sites before a rival nation; and from an existential perspective, creating human colonies in space makes it more likely that human life could survive a catastrophe on out own planet.

But the motivation of the astronauts themselves, and how they reacted to the experience, was much more personal and profound than that.