This morning, I came across a video that many may have scrolled past. I could not. It has stayed with me all day — quiet, unassuming, and yet deeply moving.

The past few years have not been kind to humanity. Since the start of this decade, we have endured a pandemic that claimed over 7 million lives — 7,113,407 precisely, according to the World Health Organisation.

What followed was not relief, but recovery — slow, uneven, and fragile. And just as the world began to steady itself, new fractures emerged: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the continuing devastation in Gaza, and an endless list of calamities – both natural and man-made.

And yet, what continues to stand out is not just the loss but the endurance — the quiet, persistent strength people carry on. I believe we have, in a remarkably short span of time, witnessed both the worst and the best of what it means to be human.

Yesterday, from 250,000 miles away from this tiny blue dot we call home, came a reminder of something far more enduring.

Aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission — the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis programme — four astronauts found themselves sharing a moment that had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with that one pesky thing which makes us undeniably human - love.

Artemis II
The Artemis mission aims to perform a 10-day, figure-eight loop around the moon, flying ~4,600 miles beyond the far side before returning to Earth.

The crew itself represents a cross-section of modern exploration. Commander Reid Wiseman, a former US Navy test pilot on his second spaceflight.

Pilot Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station for a long-duration mission.

Mission specialist Christina Koch, who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. And Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency is set to become the first Canadian to travel to the Moon.

Together, they have travelled farther than any human beings in history since the Apollo era — surpassing the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. At its peak, the Orion reached over 250,000 miles from Earth, marking a new chapter in humanity’s return to deep space.

And yet, it was not the scale of that achievement that defined this mission. It was a name. Carroll.

Where is Carroll?
As the astronauts asked permission to name two newly observed lunar craters, they proposed names for them. One Integrity and the second one - Carroll.

A small, bright crater on the Moon — visible at certain points from Earth — which the crew proposed to name after Commander Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, who passed away from cancer in 2020 at the age of 46. Carroll was a pediatric nurse practitioner and a mom to two daughters.

“A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one. And there is a feature in a really neat place on the Moon, on the nearside/farside boundary. In fact, it’s just on the nearside of that boundary, and so at certain times of the Moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth,” said Hansen.

He continued: “And so we lost a loved one. Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie."

"And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko (a bright, 27-mile-wide crater known for the white streaks that shoot out from it for up to 500 miles), and it’s just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as Ohm (a lunar impact crater), and it’s a bright spot on the Moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.”

Commander Wiseman wiped away tears and grabbed Hansen in a tight embrace. There was a pause. Then, the other astronauts joined them in the group hug.


We will always choose earth'
In that moment, suspended in the vast silence of space, history receded into the background. The distance, the records, the enormity of their journey — all of it gave way to something far more intimate.

A man grieving his wife. Three colleagues — perhaps more accurately, three companions — holding him in that grief. And on Earth, his daughters watching.

It is difficult to describe the weight of that moment without diminishing it. There was something profoundly bittersweet about it — the quiet dignity of remembrance, set against the backof one of humanity’s greatest achievements.


Watching it, I am filled with a bittersweet sense of sorrow and awe. Sorrow for a loss that time and distance cannot soften. Awe at what we, as a species, have managed to build — not just the technology to reach the Moon, but the capacity to carry our humanity with us when we get there.

But perhaps its most powerful message is not about where we are going, but who we are when we get there. Because even at the edge of the known world, we remain ourselves.

In space, the divisions that define us on Earth blur. Borders lose their meaning. Differences seem smaller, almost trivial. What remains is something far more fundamental — connection.

In that fleeting moment, these four astronauts were not representatives of nations, agencies, or milestones. They were simply people, standing beside a friend in his grief.

And here on Earth, watching them, we are reminded of a truth that is easy to forget. Astronaut or not, we are all bound by the same things — love, loss, memory. As Christina Koch reflected during the mission, “We will always choose Earth.”

Perhaps more importantly, we will always choose each other.

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