The message came at wakeup.
The four astronauts aboard Orion (Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen) had just crossed into the Moon's sphere of gravitational influence at 12:37 in the morning on April 6. They were 41,072 miles from the lunar surface, falling toward it at a rate that made the term "approach" feel inadequate.
As they fell, there came the voice of a dead man.
"Hello, Artemis II. This is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighborhood."
Jim Lovell died August 7, 2025, at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois. He was 97. He had flown to space four times, orbited the Moon twice, and survived one of history's most harrowing mechanical failures 56 years ago, when an oxygen tank exploded aboard Apollo 13, turning the Moon into a slingshot home. Two months before his death, NASA asked him to record a message for the next crew to travel this same path. Lovell agreed. And so on the morning of the most consequential day of the Artemis II mission, four astronauts floating 215,000 miles from Earth heard a 97-year-old man whisper across the distance between generations
"Don't forget to enjoy the view," he told them. "Good luck and Godspeed from all of us here on the good Earth."