Christina Koch made history this week, becoming the first woman to travel around the moon. The NASA astronaut’s lunar flyby wasn’t her first groundbreaking moment: Koch also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman and took part in the first all-female spacewalk.
Despite being a seasoned space explorer, the impact of seeing Earth as a small dot in vast blackness still astonishes Koch. In a post shared by NASA on Instagram, Koch poignantly reflected on the Artemis II mission:
The thing that changed for me, looking back at Earth, was that I found myself noticing not only the beauty of Earth, but how much blackness there was around it and how it just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet, and we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal. And the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it.
Koch, along with the rest of the Artemis II crew, return to Earth on April 10.
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