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Faith & Space · Mission Coverage
When God Meets the Stars:
The Artemis II Launch and the Wonder of It All
The first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972 lift off today. And it makes me want to look up — at the rocket, and at God.
Today, as I write these words, four human beings are strapped into a capsule on Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, waiting to ride a column of fire into the heavens and loop around the Moon. It is April 1, 2026. The launch window opens at 6:24 PM Eastern. And I cannot stop thinking about God.
That is not an accident. It never has been. Every time humanity stretches toward the sky — every rocket, every telescope, every sleepless night of stargazing — something in us is reaching for more than science. We are reaching for the One who made it all.
What Is the Artemis II Mission?
Before we get to the theology, let us get to the facts — because the facts are staggering enough on their own.
Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed lunar flyby in over half a century. Four astronauts will travel roughly 252,000 miles from Earth — farther than any human being has gone since Apollo 17 in December 1972 — on a free-return trajectory around the far side of the Moon and back. The mission is expected to last approximately 10 days, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean around April 10.
The rocket carrying them is NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket America has ever built, topped with the Orion spacecraft — named “Integrity” by its crew. Their reentry speed will be approximately 25,000 miles per hour as they hit Earth’s atmosphere.
The crew is four strong — and each of them is making history simply by boarding this spacecraft:
This is not a Moon landing — that comes later, targeted for Artemis IV in 2028. Artemis II is a systems validation mission. NASA is testing whether all of Orion’s life support, navigation, and communication technology actually works with human beings on board, in the deep-space environment that cannot be replicated here on Earth. It is the proof of concept that all future Moon missions depend on.
God Is Into Astronomy
Now let us talk about something even bigger than the rocket.
One of my favorite passages of Scripture is in the book of Isaiah, chapter 40. God is describing His own majesty to a people who had grown small in their faith, and He does something remarkable: He points to the stars.
“He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit.”
— Psalm 147:4–5 (NIV)“Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”
— Isaiah 40:26 (NIV)This was written thousands of years ago. Long before Galileo. Long before Hubble. Long before we knew there were two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. The current best estimate from astronomers is that the observable universe holds somewhere between 1022 and 1024 stars — that is a number so large it makes a trillion look like a rounding error. And the Bible says God names every single one of them.
That is not poetry for poetry’s sake. That is a God who is telling us something about the scale of His nature. He is not managing a small operation. The universe is not His limit. It is His canvas.
“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers…”
— Isaiah 40:22 (ESV)Think about that phrase: the circle of the earth. How did the writer know that? This was written roughly 2,700 years ago, in a world where most cultures believed the Earth was flat. And yet Isaiah describes God looking down at the circle of the Earth, where the inhabitants below look like grasshoppers — which is exactly the perspective you would have from orbit. God was telling us something about the view from His throne long before we had the rockets to see it for ourselves.
Looking Up Was Always Prayer
As a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. Space has always been cool to me — Star Trek, stargazing, all of it. Me and my family genuinely enjoy learning about the universe together. And sometimes I look up at the night sky and it just becomes worship. Something happens to me when I see those stars.
Even in some of my toughest moments — when I was homeless, living in a hotel room — I used to step outside at night to wind down, and I would look up at the stars and just talk to God. I did not always have the words for a formal prayer. But the sky was always there, and God was always listening.
And before I knew God — back when I was a young man in the military — I used to walk outside at night, look up at the stars, and ask myself: Who am I? What is this thing called life? I did not know it then, but I was already talking to Him. I was already doing what the Psalmist did. I was looking up. And He was already answering.
Shortly after that season, God answered those questions directly when I gave my life to Him. Because the Bible says our identity is hidden in Christ — and when you find Christ, you find yourself.
This is me fulfilling my dream to be an astronaut. There is a story behind this picture — and I will share it with you when I come back from the Moon flyby.
We Are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
— Psalm 139:14 (NIV)I want you to stop and sit with what humanity is doing today. Not tomorrow, not someday — today. Four human beings, made of the same dust as you and me, are launching themselves off this planet, riding controlled explosions into the vacuum of space, and are going to loop around the Moon traveling at speeds that would vaporize most things we know. And they will come home.
That is not an accident of evolution. That is the image of God made manifest. When Genesis 1:26 says we are made in God’s image and likeness, it means something — and one of the things it means is that we carry within us a creative, problem-solving, boundary-pushing capacity that is unlike anything else in the natural world. No other creature on Earth builds rockets. No other creature looks up at the Moon and says, I want to go there.
We should feel great about who we are. Not arrogant — there is a difference. Pride says look what I did. Awe says look what God made possible through me. Artemis II is an invitation to the second kind.
And it should also humble us. Because getting four people into a capsule and pointing it at the Moon is, as someone who grew up wanting to be an astronaut, one of the hardest things we have ever done. The delays alone tell the story: Artemis II was originally supposed to launch in early 2026. It was scrubbed after a liquid hydrogen leak. Then again for a helium flow issue in the upper stage. They rolled the rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building and started over. It took everything we had to get to today — and even then, an issue with the flight termination system almost stopped the launch just hours ago before engineers resolved it.
And to God? The Bible tells us He spoke the universe into existence. All of it. In six days. Every star, every galaxy, every planet we are still discovering — He said it and it was. What takes us years of engineering, billions of dollars, and centuries of accumulated human knowledge is the work of His word.
Dr. Kent Hovind pointed this out to me once in one of his documentaries — and it has never left me. The Earth’s atmosphere is perfectly designed to sustain life and perfectly designed to make it costly to leave. God did not make space easy to reach. He made the Earth to be inhabited. And we are trying to find life on other planets when the miracle is already right here, in the world He made for us.
“For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited)…”
— Isaiah 45:18 (ESV)Did Elon Musk’s Rocket Program Push NASA?
This is one of the most interesting questions swirling around Artemis — and the honest answer is: yes, and it is complicated.
SpaceX has been part of the Artemis program from the beginning, winning the contract in 2021 to build the lunar lander that would take astronauts to the Moon’s surface. But the competition in the commercial space sector has done something to NASA that a government agency often struggles to do on its own: it created urgency.
In October 2025, then-acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went on CNBC and said directly about SpaceX: “We’re not going to wait for one company. We’re going to push this forward and win the second space race against the Chinese.” He reopened the lunar lander contract to competitors — including Blue Origin — specifically because SpaceX’s Starship had experienced delays. Meanwhile, Elon Musk pushed back on social media, saying SpaceX was “moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry” and predicting Starship would end up doing the entire Moon mission.
Whether you side with Musk or with NASA leadership on that debate, the dynamic is undeniable: competition accelerates progress. Blue Origin poured more resources into lunar missions to make its case. SpaceX published milestone reports to defend its contracts. NASA scrambled to simplify mission architectures. The result is an Artemis program moving faster than it would have in the absence of private-sector pressure.
The deeper context is China. Chinese officials have stated publicly that they intend a crewed lunar landing by 2030. That is the real race — not SpaceX vs. NASA, but the United States vs. a geopolitical rival with its own ambitious lunar program. Commercial competition, in this frame, is not a distraction. It is a strategic advantage. Every SpaceX test, every Blue Origin milestone, and every NASA launch narrows the gap between where America is and where it needs to be.
What we are watching today — a rocket from the 1960s era of government-only space travel evolving into a mixed economy of public missions and private landers — is genuinely new in human history. And it is producing results. Artemis II is on the pad today. The astronauts are strapped in. The countdown is running.
Don’t Miss the Grandeur
I said it at the beginning, and I will say it again as we close: I do not want us to miss this.
Not the launch. Not the history. Not the engineering miracle of four human beings surviving a 252,000-mile round trip around the Moon in a capsule traveling at 25,000 miles per hour. But also — and more importantly — do not miss the God who made it possible. Do not stand in awe of the universe and forget to stand in awe of the One who built it. Do not look at the stars and think how great is science without also thinking how great is the God of science.
The heavens declare His glory. They have been doing it for billions of years. We are just now building the equipment to go see it up close.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.”
— Psalm 19:1–2 (NIV)I encourage you today — wherever you are when you read this — to do what I used to do standing outside a hotel at my lowest point, or walking a base as a young military man before I knew His name: look up. Ask the big questions. Because the God who counts the stars and names every one of them is not far off. He is the One those questions are addressed to. And He answers.
Get to know the God who created the heavens and the Earth. Don’t just stand in awe of the universe. Stand in awe of the Creator of the universe — and get to know Him. Because He loves you. And He wants to be invited into your life.
Godspeed, Artemis II.
Reid Wiseman. Victor Glover. Christina Koch. Jeremy Hansen. May your journey around the Moon remind every person watching what we are — and Whose we are.
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