Artemis II’s journey to the moon

During the first week of April, four image-bearers hurtled toward the lesser light to swing around it before returning to Earth. The astronauts in Artemis II, including a Canadian, were an important step on humanity’s return to the Moon after about half a century. Future Artemis astronauts hope to land and ultimately to build a permanent base on the Moon.

This mission took humans farther from Earth than any before. The Moon is approximately 384,400 km from Earth, and when we add the distance Artemis II travelled past the Moon, they were more than 400,000 km from Earth, a distance approximately ten times the circumference of the Earth.

Incredible distances

And yet, while this seems like a great distance, it’s small by cosmic standards. Because light travels at the fastest speed possible (299,729 km/s), distances in the cosmos are discussed in terms of how long it takes for light to travel them. Using this scale, it takes about 8 minutes, 20 seconds, for light from our sun to reach us – we are 8.3 light-minutes from the sun. At the far end of their journey, the astronauts will be 1.3 light-seconds from Earth. The distance means that when communicating, there will be a noticeable delay of about a second from when we ask a question on Earth to when the astronauts hear it, as radio waves are a form of light.

However, when we look at God’s cosmos, the distance to the Moon, or even the sun, is minuscule. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter. The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. This makes Artemis II’s 1.3 light-seconds seem like nothing.

Unanswered questions

Standing in a country field on a clear night, away from city lights, looking up at the stars, we can feel the smallness of our world in God’s cosmos. As the psalmist says, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4)

Yet we bear God’s image and likeness, and God sent his Son to die for us and show us the coming victory in the resurrection. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again” is one of the oldest statements of faith. And it happened on this speck of a planet in a vast cosmos.

I don’t pretend to know why God, in his creative activity, made the cosmos as large as it is. This is just one of the unanswered questions we live with, amid the sure knowledge of his continuing presence on this Earth in the person of the Holy Spirit. One day, when Christ returns, we may be able to ask why the universe is so large, but for now, all we can do is stand in awe of the majesty of the creation we have been given.