“If the great brain of NASA were attached to any particular sense, it was the eye,” wrote Norman Mailer in his psychedelic history of the Apollo program. Whatever else one may say of the agency, its ability to produce evocative images remains unrivaled.
Artemis II, NASA’s just-concluded lunar mission, will be remembered for many things, but the photos it captured were inarguably bangers: of a crescent “earthset,” wildly polychromatic against the void of space; of a lunar eclipse of the sun; of the moon’s mottled surface, vivid and strangely inviting. And then of the all-too-dramatic splashdown on Friday, with four astronauts plonking safely into the Pacific, having traveled further than any humans in history.