As astronaut Christina Koch prepared to board NASA’s Artemis II mission to the moon, she bid goodbye to her husband by cupping her hands into a heart. The gesture, which has become more popular over the past few years thanks to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, was simple. But the girls who got it, got it.
It was just one of many small moments during the historic mission to the moon that has felt like a celebration of femininity here on Earth.
There are the celebratory images from mission control, in which nearly every scientist cheering and smiling is a woman. There’s the stuffed doll of Artemis, the cat version from Sailor Moon, taking a prominent spot between the computers guiding the astronauts through space. There’s the fact that a large portion of the time when you watch the live stream of the mission, the voices communicating back and forth are women.
There’s the moment when the mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, shouted out to his daughters, Katey and Ellie, on the ground and made the same heart with his hands while showing off his Swift-inspired friendship bracelets. “Copy hearts, copy bracelets,” the woman at mission control told him.
And when the crew announced they’d chosen to name a previously unnamed crater on the moon after Wiseman’s late wife, who died of cancer in 2020, there wasn’t a dry eye in the Artemis II or on the ground.
“It’s a bright spot on the moon,” fellow astronaut Jeremy Hansen said, “and we would like to call it Carroll.”
In many ways NASA’s Artemis II mission reflects the strides American society has made since we last sent a crew of astronauts on a moon mission in 1972. The Apollo missions were all crewed by white men, 24 in total (though mathematician Katherine Johnson was a key player of the missions on Earth). With the Artemis mission, Koch has become the first woman to venture into deep space and journey around the moon; her colleague, Victor Glover, is the first Black man to do the same.
The firsts are not limited to the astronauts, however. Several women with key roles in the launch are making history in their roles, too, including Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first woman launch director, and Vanessa Wyche, the first Black woman director of the Johnson space center.
Photos from mission control show just how many women are behind making Artemis II a success. Women astronauts Chris Birch and Jenni Gibbons can be seen on headset talking to the crew, while public affairs officer Leah Cheshier Mustachio hosts the YouTube live stream. Kiarre Dumas, an exploration scientist, went viral on social media after viewers watching the stream called out her chic braids and glasses, dubbing her a “badass space woman.”
“I cried when I saw her,” wrote one woman on Threads.
Collectively, the Artemis II mission has felt to many women to be a moment of celebration and achievement, one small step of victory for womankind. Even the mission’s name, Artemis, feels fitting: It honors the Greek goddess of the moon, the twin of the god Apollo, who was the namesake of the first missions half a century ago.
Many of those following this historic spaceflight are feeling something that’s hard to come by as a woman in the US in 2026: hope.
Look, things on Earth haven’t been great. From losing our reproductive rights to watching disturbing misogynistic trends emerge in culture, American women have been through it. We’ve watched many of the gains we’ve made be undone by the Trump administration, which has been rolling back diversity at every level as it strikes the very kinds of programs that lead to the creation of a team like the one in Artemis II.
But when we hear a woman astronaut speak from space to a woman on the ground, or see the smiling faces of so many women as they celebrate historic achievements they evvel weren’t privy to, it’s a powerful reminder that hope springs eternal. We may not have a woman as president, but we have a woman in space—and that’s something to hold on to.
It’s a message of perseverance that Koch echoed in her remarks, when she said she felt humbled to be standing where she was because of those who broke barriers for her.
“We would never be here if it weren’t for so many people that came before us—starting with Neil Armstrong, Katherine Johnson, civil rights movement leaders—everyone who worked on this spacecraft before we got here,” she said.
