Earth Day in the Artemis era: Can NASA’s moon missions spur a new environmental movement?
April 22, 2026
4 min read
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Earth Day in the Artemis era: Can NASA’s moon missions spur a new environmental movement?
Fresh takes on Apollo’s famous “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” images showed off our planet’s beauty just weeks before Earth Day
By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson
Artemis II’s “Earthset” image.
Just 14 days ago, amid the mundanity of East Coast commutes and West Coast alarm clocks, NASA’s Artemis II mission gave humans across the nation and around the world a stunning new image of our planet.
In it, a crescent of Earth’s blue vitality hovers amid the blackness of space, above a high-definition brownish gray wasteland of lunar craters. It’s an eerily familiar recreation of the iconic “Earthrise” photograph from 1968’s Apollo 8, a mission with a similar flight path to Artemis II that came amid a troubled moment for Earth that many also say feels familiar today. The original “Earthrise” was just one of hundreds of thousands photographs taken during the 11 crewed Apollo missions, but it has, over the decades, become laden with symbolism about humanity and our relationship with space and our planet.
“What’s been fascinating about Artemis II is that we’ve seen many of these overarching narratives about spaceflight return—how space exploration helps us understand how we’re connected, how we share the planet, how beautiful but vulnerable our planet is,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
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Apollo 8’s “Earthrise” image, captured in 1968.
NASA
The Apollo Era
On Apollo 8’s launch day, human spaceflight was less than a decade old, and no one had seen the Earth from beyond orbit. When the trio of astronauts zipped around the far side of the moon and saw their home planet sparkling above its barren surface—even though they had known to expect the moment—they were spellbound.
It was a response repeated on each subsequent mission, says Catherine Newell, a historian of religion and science at the University of Miami, who has written a book about space exploration. “Almost every Apollo astronaut came back to Earth a fundamentally changed person,” she says. “It really shook them to their core in a spiritual way to see Earth just kind of hovering there by itself in the void.”
A sense of that experience translated to the billions of humans back on Earth through the images astronauts captured of our planet, particularly “Earthrise” and Apollo 17’s “Blue Marble” photograph (the first image captured by an astronaut that showed Earth’s full disk suspended in space).
The “Blue Marble” image, the first astronaut-captured full view of Earth’s disk from space.
NASA
Between these two missions and their iconic photographs was the first Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, 1970. On that day, a loosely organized network of celebrations, protests and teach-ins tapped into decades of growing interest in land and wildlife conservation and concerns about pollution and overpopulation. At the time, environmental initiatives were popular across the political spectrum, says Keith Woodhouse, an environmental historian at Northwestern University. “There was more of a sense back then that environmentalism was a commonsense idea, because who would object to clean water, clean air, forests and pretty places?”
As the environmental movement developed, it adopted the images of Earth from space—thanks in part to NASA’s own efforts to communicate how the agency’s Earth science research was related to phenomena such as the ozone hole and climate change, says Neil Maher, an environmental historian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “By collecting global scientific data and then combining it with these incredible images of Earth,” he says, “they turned images from space into environmental symbols.” By the 1990s the “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” images were all over environmental demonstrations.
The Artemis Era
The Artemis II crew were the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit since 1972. They followed Apollo’s path but with a modern understanding of what their home planet faced.
During the long trek back to Earth, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reminded viewers that appreciating and tending Earth doesn’t require the journey of a lifetime. “The perspective I launched with was that