The arrival on the Moon in 1969 was a technological feat, but above all political and symbolic. It emerged in a polarized world where every scientific advance was, or wanted to appear, a demonstration of strength. In that context, the United States turned the Apollo program into a priority operation. It was necessary to demonstrate that its social, economic, and ideological model was capable of achieving what the Soviet Union could not, and to underline in the most theatrical and incontestable way possible the superiority of a political system. The pressure generated a concentration of funds and a collective will that is hard to imagine today. They were the happy sixties, yes, but what drove the joke up is disconcerting: during the peak of the Apollo program, between 1964 and 1966, NASA's budget reached between 4% and 4.5% of federal spending and approximately 0.8% of US GDP, which at that time was, and by a very large margin, the richest country in the world. It was a disproportionate amount, but even so, it met with little opposition. The technology available at the time – computers with ridiculous capacity, materials still in experimental phase, etc. – is also disconcerting, but the political and social determination was absolute. Risk was assumed as part of the project, and society accepted a dose of almost suicidal audacity, which today might not be accepted.Artemis II, on the other hand, fits into the framework of the “new world disorder”, where bloc logic has been replaced by a multiplicity of actors, interests, and often contradictory priorities. The space race is no longer a grand ideological duel, but a modest foosball match of economic competition and technological exhibition. Space agencies must justify every euro invested to fragmented public opinions, shaped by a media ecosystem that demands immediate and photogenic results. Technology is immensely superior – state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems, ultra-sophisticated materials, simulations that anticipate thousands of scenarios – but collective will is more diffuse. Risk, which in 1969 was an exciting element inherent to the epic, is perceived very differently today. The paradox – exponentially more advanced technology, yet achievements perceived as less epic – reveals a profound shift in postmodern mentality.

The splashdown of the Orion capsule early Saturday morning, marking the end of the Artemis II mission, was extraordinarily spectacular and suspenseful. In the most dangerous stage of the mission, other elements come into play, such as the beauty of the images, the violence of the contact with the atmosphere, and the eventual loss of connection with the crew.

Humanity, with the Artemis mission, is once again looking towards the Moon and, with it, unearths from the memory chest the old space race that marked the Cold War. Back then, amidst the dangerous tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world fractured into two irreconcilable blocs and the conquest of space became another stage for geopolitical competition. It was not just about reaching further, but about demonstrating who had the capacity to impose themselves on the other. In this context, the media flooded the collective imagination for years with images of rockets, astronauts, and distant planets. A persistent iconography that not only informed, but also shaped how society thought about tomorrow. Because, fundamentally, every society is also built upon this inevitable question: what awaits us in the future?Imagining life in space involved speculating about what this day-to-day would be like, and design was launched to rethink furniture, cars, and housing for this projected future. Between armchairs that evoked capsules and residences that seemed like orbital stations, the "space age" fashion was born, conceived to facilitate a hypothetical interplanetary life. Creators like André Courrèges or Pierre Cardin opted for rigid outfits, detached from the body, almost like shells. White, associated with the aerospace universe, became the dominant color, accompanied by helmets and metallic boots. In parallel, Paco Rabanne's proposals took fashion towards the realm of engineering, with pieces made of metallic plates that stretched the very limits of the discipline.What is revealing, seen with perspective, is the extent to which these speculations about the future have outstripped reality. If we had listened to Stanley Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Star Trek or even to The Jetsons, today we would already be living among flying cars, off planet Earth and in zero gravity conditions. But perhaps it is even more significant to note that, if technological imagination often goes too far, it tends, on the other hand, to fall short in other areas: such as women's rights. In these imaginary worlds, they continue to occupy subordinate positions, even in futures where humanity already inhabits other planets. And this forces us to ask whether we are really dealing with speculations or, rather, with projected male desires.However, beyond the television impact of the first moon landing –a moment highly choreographed from a propagandistic point of view by the United States–, the most transformative image was not that of the Moon, but that of the Earth. The Blue Marble photograph, which became humanity's first selfie, revealed a paradox: after years of division and confrontation, what we saw was, in reality, a single shared unit. And it was precisely this compact image that activated, in a part of the population, a new pacifist and ecological consciousness.Unlike the Cold War, today the United States does not compete in a strictly bipolar world, even though the space race continues to be a duel, this time with China, which has also set out to step on the Moon in the coming years. It is, however, inevitable to point out the paradox: at a time when the world seems to be fragmenting and humanity is going through a deep crisis of values, we look outwards again. Perhaps, as in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris", this journey is not so much about the future as about the past. Or perhaps – and herein lies the question – it should serve us, precisely, to look better in the mirror and rethink where we stand as humanity. But perhaps, seeing the recent images of Artemis astronauts wishing a Happy Easter from space and looking for eggs around the ship, what is in doubt is not the future, but whether we still have any shred of self-awareness.

While Artemis II was circumnavigating the Moon in strict live broadcast, bombs fell and rained miserably on Beirut, the US president announced the liquidation of an entire civilization in a flash and the IMF warned us to prepare for the worst. While we were telekinetically watching the Moon, the permanent global war accelerated its homicidal and lunatic impulses on Earth. And this, when freely looking at the Moon is a universal right all over the world that, for now, no one has managed to prohibit or commercialize. Yet. It won't be for contradictions or antagonisms, nor because one thing doesn't deny the other –or does it– nor because they steal our attention every day, the most profitable contemporary business, while they steal our wallet every night. Improbable balance, if indispensable scientific knowledge excites me with every advance, the geopolitical lunar imperial race terrifies me with every step. Words of Montaigne: "Anaximenes wrote to Pythagoras: how can I occupy my time solving the secret of the stars, if I always have slavery and death before me?".To that film titled Don’t look up –don’t look up and don’t become aware, in the era of the anthropocene, of how we are destroying the planet–, we could add Don’t look down –avoid always looking at the devastating social consequences of capitalism in its rogue, warlike, authoritarian, and sociopathic phase–. Even, they also subtly order us never to look to the side –not to worry if the neighbor is about to be evicted, if their mental health is faltering, or if loneliness is consuming them–. That is to say, almost generally, the systemic systematic order is that, between the navel and the spaceship, we look nowhere. And that we only look at the screen, where the algorithm –which already knows you better than you do– will make you happy with addictive dopamine. Without giving up any battlefield, those we choose and those we don’t, I can’t help but say this week that is ending: I wish libraries were filled more than TikTok. I wish. And if they say, as a metaphor, that Yuri Gagarin blurted out "I don't see any God up here", one wonders, down here, where the hell is God in Gaza. Nowhere?Journey to the Center of the Earth, it turns out that the urge to escape to conquer the Moon clumsily connects, in a revived geopolitical space race, with the real repeat offenders. The steppe wolves of the free market and the pimps of power – so often Martian, so often alien –. The hidden face of the Earth has nothing hidden about it: it would be not what is not seen, but what we do not want to look at. What we see every day and refuse to accept. An Essay on Blindness, Saramago would say. Artemis II will cost 93 billion dollars. 3.8% of a runaway global military budget. It is the same amount with which the UN has estimated the cost of eradicating hunger completely from the face of the Earth – not from the Moon –. Meanwhile, in space, we are doing the same as on Earth: polluting it into an infinite landfill. It is officially estimated that more than 10,000 tons of debris and scrap metal are already orbiting the Earth. A poem –A Farewell to the Astronauts– by Hans Magnus Enzensberger delves into the wound: "Only on planets / where no orange trees grow / nor walnuts nor vines / do I give little value. [...] Poor in imagination and rather conservative / I stick to older / promises: / the earth to the earth / and the dust to the dust".Neither technophile nor technophobic nor technoneutral nor technofascist, many years ago I read a small gem of sublunary terrestrial ethics called People Who Don't Want to Travel to Mars (Catarata, 2004). It was written by the good Jorge Riechmann, a philosopher, professor, and committed citizen. Today Jorge is facing prison sentences, in two trials scheduled for May in Madrid, for protesting, peacefully and scientifically, against inaction in the face of the climate emergency. Things that happen on Earth and not on the Moon, because surely there are other worlds, but I would say they are all here. In that book, which I revisit often, I read a phrase by Stanisław Jerzy Lec: "Don't try to reach the Moon. It should still last us a billion years." It is quite likely that nihilistic technofantasy makes us believe in other planets because we no longer believe in this one, and that it makes us believe in technological transhumanism because we no longer give a damn about the ambiguous and ambivalent human condition. Completely abandoning terrestrial exploration – let's say – of social justice, ecosocial transition, political democracy, or freedom among equals. Close to the ground, between the right to look at the Moon and the duty to preserve the Earth, we must radically resolve that one thing is the imperial colonization of space under the brutal law of the far west and another, very different and antagonistic, the humble wisdom of Carl Sagan. Long ago, about this pale blue dot where we still live, he wrote this, regarding the face – neither hidden nor dark – of the Earth:«Look again at this spot. It is here, it is our home, it is us. In it all of those whom you love, all of those whom you know, all of those of whom you have ever heard, every human being who ever lived, lived out its life. The sum of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor or explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties committed by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel upon the hardly distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill each other, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot. Our home. That pale dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The universe is a very big place in a very big cosmic arena. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The universe is a very big place in a very big cosmic arena. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the illusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this pale dot.Our planet is a lonely point in the great expanse of cosmic darkness. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from anywhere else to save us from ourselves. Earth is the only world known for now to harbor life. There is no other place, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle down, not yet. One way or another, for now, Earth is the place where we must make our stand. Astronomy has been said to be an experience of humility and character building. Perhaps there is no better demonstration of the folly of human prejudices than this distant image of our tiny world. For me, it underscores our responsibility to treat each other more kindly, and to preserve this pale blue dot, the only home we have ever known. Amen.

In all space missions, there is an evident risk to the lives of astronauts. And the most delicate moments are always takeoff and landing. But in Artemis II, NASA's mission that concludes this Friday after ten days of travel, the return to Earth is undoubtedly the most risky moment. To begin with, because during takeoff the astronauts had an ejection system in case of emergency (which would have expelled them to save them in case of an explosion), but above all because the re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere this time presents some extra challenges compared to previous missions.

Mission accomplished. The four Artemis II astronauts are back on Earth, after going to the Moon and returning. This historic mission, which lasted 10 days, is the first in over 50 years to take humans to the Moon, and it has made them the people who have traveled farthest from Earth in the history of humanity. At 1:53 AM, Catalan time, the Orion capsule carrying the astronauts re-entered Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 km per hour, faster than any other spacecraft before. A particularly risky maneuver, but one that has been successfully overcome.

Science fiction is one of the genres that best allow us to verify that human imagination is more reliable than we ourselves are often willing to admit. In the space of not many years, science fiction ideas that were cataloged as mere fantasies have become realities: for example, only one hundred and four years separate the publication of the novel "From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne from the arrival of Apollo XI on “our” satellite. Changes have occurred more rapidly as the 20th century progressed and the 21st arrived: the script for the film Blade Runner (freely based on a story by Philip K. Dick) brought to the table issues such as artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, climate change, or large migratory movements, which in little more than forty years are the most prominent problems on the international agenda. Another film based on a novel (science fiction practices promiscuity of narrative languages, and goes hand in hand with literature, cinema, comics, video games, etc.), like Soylent Green, posed the global food crisis and the degradation of democracy with the consequent emergence of authoritarian forms of government, as we see today. The Californian company Foundation is driving the mass production of a robot called Phantom MK-1 that – unlike other major robotics proposals known so far – is specifically designed to fight in war situations (Terminator). Major technology companies have long been researching time travel and the colonization of Mars.The lesson of all this is that everything we imagine is also real. If we can imagine it, it is already real. That is why, from Aristotle to the Surrealists, there have always been those who have defended the lucidity of dreams. Ideas that at some point were rejected, ridiculed, or directly persecuted as fantasy, delirium, or blasphemy (such as traveling to the Moon, demonstrating that the Moon orbited the Earth and that the Earth orbited the Sun, or asserting that the Earth is round and not flat) become empirical and undeniable realities thanks to the intelligence and persistent effort of a species, the human one, which does not always dedicate itself to committing atrocities.The Artemis II mission has opened the era of Moon conquest. The objective will be to inhabit the Moon, establish bases and laboratories there, work there, build there, colonize it. This means a new race between the world powers, and the need to deploy an ad hoc legislation that will be complex and that will have to be avoided (I don't know how) from being put from the start at the service of oligarchies and oligopolies. And that another science fiction prediction is not fulfilled, in this case from the film Matrix: “You humans –Agent Smith said–, you establish yourselves in a place, you consume all the resources, and when you have exhausted them, you go to another place and do the same thing again. There is only one other species that behaves this way, and that is the virus.”

The day after the four astronauts of the Artemis II mission have made history by becoming the humans who have traveled farthest into space —406,771 kilometers from Earth—, ARA interviews Josep Maria Trigo, principal investigator of the Asteroids, Comets, Meteorites and Planetary Sciences group at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Catalan Studies for Space (IEEC).

The most symbolic images of the Artemis II space mission can now be admired. The White House has distributed the first two photographs in which the Earth can be seen from the far side of the Moon and another image of the total solar eclipse that the crew has experienced from space. "Humanity from the other side" ("Humanity, from the other side", in the original message), has been the text accompanying the images distributed from the official account of the presidency of the United States.

Our parents or your grandparents followed, in the old way, the arrival of man on the Moon, on television, that July of 1969. We called him “man”, because we used the generic to mean “humanity” or “human being”, but also because the astronauts who stepped on it were men. We remember their names and their words. Those of Neil Armstrong: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. The rocket was called Apollo 11 (the name of the god of medicine and masculine beauty).

NASA's Artemis II mission rocket is already halfway to the Moon, after leaving Earth's orbit, and is advancing at 5,632 kilometers per hour to become the first mission to carry humans to the satellite in more than 50 years. The objective in this case is not to land on the Moon but to orbit it and return to Earth, to test the technology that should finally allow a lunar landing in 2028. The four astronauts of the mission - who are bringing their own mobile phones on board - have already sent the first spectacular images of Earth from their perspective, and they are expected to reach the Moon on Monday night. By Saturday, the spacecraft was already more than 219,000 kilometers away, closer to the Moon than to our planet.

The first crewed mission to the Moon in more than half a century begins its countdown with maximum expectation. If all goes according to plan, NASA will launch the rocket – with three astronauts from the United States and one from Canada on board – on Wednesday, April 1 (in Catalonia, it will already be Thursday morning). The Orion spacecraft will only orbit the Moon and return without landing on it, with the aim of testing the capsule where the crew will travel and preparing NASA for its next lunar landing in subsequent missions. The Artemis II mission marks the return of humans to the Moon after the Apollo 17 journey (the sixth mission and last moon landing) in 1972. This is everything you need to know about this extraordinary mission and the astronauts making the journey.

After announcing a few weeks ago that the Artemis III mission would not take humans to the lunar surface as planned, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the agency's new plans on Tuesday to fulfill President Donald Trump's promise to reach our satellite before its Chinese rivals. The new plans involve delaying the lunar landing by a year from the initial forecast: the Artemis IV mission will now launch in 2028. Later, he announced, a permanent U.S. base will be built on the lunar surface. "Our goal this time is not flags or footprints, but to stay on the Moon," Isaacman stated during the public presentation of NASA's plan, which took place on Tuesday under the evocative title of Ignition (ignition). "We will not let go of the Moon again," he asserted.

NASA restarts the clock for the launch of the first manned mission to the Moon After more than 50 years since the last trip, the return flight is scheduled for Friday, March 6 (Saturday, March 7, Catalan time), following the successful completion of the second full fuel test. It was "a very successful day," the US space agency announced, following the satisfactory test results. Weather permitting, NASA hopes to take advantage of a launch window in two weeks to launch the Artemis II mission, with four astronauts on board, who will spend ten days in space on the far side of the Moon. The mission's objective is to prepare for a future mission that will explore the Moon further. The launch will take place from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Miami, from where the future crew monitored the fuel tests.

NASA's Artemis II mission, which was scheduled to launch next weekend to a manned mission around the MoonThe launch of the Artemis II spacecraft has been postponed until at least March after a fuel leak was detected during test flights on Tuesday. NASA announced the postponement through its official channels, now indicating March as "the earliest possible launch opportunity for the Artemis II mission," which will carry four astronauts. The plan is for them to orbit the Moon before returning to Earth.

We'll soon be able to enjoy another supermoon: this Wednesday, November 5th, brings what's known as the Beaver Supermoon. It will be the second supermoon of the year, but the largest of the three in 2025. Specifically, it will appear up to 7.7% larger and 16% brighter than usual, according to Meteolluna. A supermoon is a phenomenon that occurs when a full moon coincides with the point in its orbit where the satellite is closest to Earth. This Wednesday, the satellite will be about 356,967 km away, making it the closest point to Earth this year. However, this will happen at 2:19 PM Catalan time, not at night, but we'll explain when it will be best seen.

On July 20, 1969, two American astronauts, Edwin Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, landed on the moon. It was the first time a human had set foot on it: those of us old enough to have seen it live on television (a friend of our parents brought a small, white, portable television with horn-shaped antennas to our summer vacation spot) still remember the hopping sounds the two astronauts made, seemingly floating on the surface of planet Earth. Armstrong, the commander, was the first to set foot on the lunar surface, a moment he summed up in a historic phrase: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The imprint of their shoes on the dusty ground became an iconic image. Afterward, they both planted an American flag, which they had enriched because otherwise, in the lunar atmosphere, which is despicable, it wouldn't have flown. And they returned to Earth. (Even today you can find some lost denier who insists on saying that it was all a television montage.)

NASA announced Tuesday that it plans to launch its first crewed mission to the Moon in fifty years between February and April 2026. The flight will be a round trip around the satellite, and the US space agency views it as a safety and endurance test, as the goal is to confirm its viability, explained Lakiesha Hawkins, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, in a press conference.

Seven years ago, María Jesús Puerta Angulo was diagnosed with breast cancer during a routine check-up and is still battling the disease today. She is feeling better and hopes to be discharged soon, but explains that getting here has been a complicated path, especially because she has combined it with raising her children, both teenagers. The treatment and constant visits to specialists took a great toll on her physically and emotionally, but one day she saw a NASA competition announced for an innovative project to recycle waste from the Moon. She signed up to encourage her children to pursue their goals, no matter how many difficulties they encountered along the way, and she was extremely surprised when she discovered she had won.

"Wake me up when September ends," sings Billie Joe Armstrong in one of the songs on the album American idiotby the punk-rock band Green Day. In this song, the singer pays tribute to his father who died one September day. The fact is that this month, like the song itself, has a melancholic quality for many people: the holidays are coming to an end, summer is drawing to a close with the days getting shorter, and everything returns to its harsh routine, which provokes an unconscious desire for October to arrive quickly. Fortunately, we can heal the nostalgia for times past, even if only partially, with a night sky filled with diverse and interesting offerings.