Artemis 2 photos are coming back from around the moon and Dr. Sarah Rugheimer says go find the CNN gallery of thirty of them right now. She has been watching from Edinburgh. She studies this for a living. She still finds them beautiful in a way that exceeds the professional.

What does it mean that robots can genuinely do this better and cheaper and we are sending humans anyway? Dr. Sarah Rugheimer says the answer is not scientific. It is human. Exploration, bonding, the collective experience of following astronauts as they look back at a pale blue dot they just left behind. Every one of the twelve people who have walked on the moon was American. Jeremy Hansen, currently orbiting it, is the first person from outside the United States to go around it.

Mars is the destination Sarah Rugheimer has wanted to see her whole life. She wants it done carefully. If you bring back a Martian microbe and you are wrong about what it is, you are very wrong. She saw Project Hail Mary three times in theatres. That movie is about the same kind of wrong. Go see it.

Topics: Artemis 2 photos moon, Jeremy Hansen first non-American moon, astrobiology Mars contamination, Project Hail Mary movie, orbital dynamics

GUEST: Sarah Rugheimer | http://sarahrugheimer.com

Originally aired on2026-04-07