{"id":611559,"date":"2026-04-16T21:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T21:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/611559\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T21:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T21:40:09","slug":"artemis-ii-crew-talk-about-their-moon-mission-live-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/611559\/","title":{"rendered":"Artemis II crew talk about their Moon mission – live updates"},"content":{"rendered":"

Echoes of the Apollo 8 missionpublished at 20:59 BST<\/p>\n

20:59 BST<\/p>\n

\"\"Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent<\/p>\n

Watching the Artemis II crew from launch to splashdown to today’s press conference, I keep thinking back to another lunar fly\u2011round in a very different age.<\/p>\n

In 1968, Apollo 8 was officially a test flight, sent to check out navigation and communications ahead of the first Moon landing. For many in my generation, it became something much bigger.<\/p>\n

That mission gave us Earthrise: the first colour photograph of our planet, a jewelled blue marble hanging in the blackness above the grey lunar surface.<\/p>\n

It helped kick\u2011start the modern environmental movement and made people feel, perhaps for the first time, that the Earth was fragile and needed friends.<\/p>\n

\"SunImage source, NASAImage caption, <\/p>\n

Earthrise over the lunar landscape<\/p>\n

Apollo 8\u2019s crew read from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve and closed with a blessing \u201cto all of you on the good Earth\u201d, as one quarter of humanity listened.<\/p>\n

They were speaking into a year marked by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy \u2013 a world that felt wretched to many adults, even as children like me were simply transfixed by the Moon on television.<\/p>\n

Today, the parallels are hard to miss: a planet riven by conflict, environmental crisis and political division. Artemis II is again a loop around the Moon, again at a time when the news is often bleak.<\/p>\n

In 1968 it was the astronauts that gave us hope of a better future. Perhaps the words from the next generation of lunar explorers can give us an echo of that hope and inspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Echoes of the Apollo 8 missionpublished at 20:59 BST 20:59 BST Pallab GhoshScience correspondent Watching the Artemis II…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":611560,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-611559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611559\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}