A Before and After: How Our Earth’s Climate has Changed Between Two Historic Space Missions

By ​Kavitha Kasturi

The overview effect: a sentiment astronauts feel when viewing Earth from the depths of space. Amidst a vast nothingness, they begin to feel a sense of deep appreciation for our home planet, a recognition that Earth is where we all belong.
That feeling was not lost upon the astronauts who embarked upon the most recent space mission, Artemis II. As Christina Koch, one of those astronauts said, “We will explore. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will inspire — but ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.” She was struck with a feeling of unity and connection to our planet. (CNN, 2026)

This effect that Koch and her fellow astronauts felt as they viewed Earth, encased in its thin clouded atmosphere, recognizing how fragile and unifying it is, is a phenomenon that many astronauts have shared, and one that has historically been brought back to those of us that have never left our planet.

Just as the 4 astronauts aboard Oasis, the Artemis II ship, the astronauts a part of the Project Apollo Missions shared similar feelings of appreciation for their home. The Project Apollo missions were able to spread the overview effect to the Earth-ridden people through the photos captured on the mission. The iconic Apollo 8 “Earthrise” and Apollo 17's “Whole Earth” images in the black abyss of space served as a reminder of the fragility and uniqueness of our planet. That new appreciation that those astronauts brought to us land-dwellers helped spur on the rising environmental movement that marked the early 1970s. Apollo was described as “the Rosetta Stone by which not just the American public but all of humankind could see itself in context and decipher our own situatedness and need for ecocritical awareness” (SAGE Journals, 2009). But did this Rosetta Stone truly work? Has there been tangible differences made from that 1968 “Earth Rise” photo to now in the way we all treat our home?

From the U.S.’s first moon mission to our latest, we have only seen a downtrend in Earth’s environmental health.
The 1960s space race didn't only leave us with a simultaneous sense of guilt and appreciation for our Earth, but it also left us with the launch of many satellite observation platforms that have transformed our ability to understand and predict global climate changes.

One satellite instrument set, the NASA Ceres, measures changes in the Earth’s energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by the planet and the thermal energy radiated back into space. The data shows a strong upward trend, indicative of a growing rate of energy accumulation, consistent with an acceleration in global heating. Moreover, there was an average global temperature increase of 1.2 °C from 1960 to 2026. Although a seemingly small number, this manifests as regional temperature extremes being much more likely. Recent research has shown that a 40°C day in the UK is now over 20 times more likely than it was in the 1960s. (The Conversation, 2024).

Heating isn’t our only problem. Since that Apollo 8 mission, the Keeling Curve, an ongoing record of atmospheric CO2 concentration, shows a steep and steady increase from about 320 parts per million (ppm) in 1968 to about 430ppm in 2026. That is an increase of over one-third in the total carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (The Conversation, 2024).
Looking now at the “Earth-set” photo captured by the Artemis II crew, I am left only with hope that this moon mission will allow our human race to see, once again, the delicacy of our grand oasis. The goal of Artemis II was not simply to further explore the intricacies of the dark side of the moon, or test what it takes for humans to endure a space mission of that incredible distance, but also to once again show the world the fragility of our home Earth. No matter how many times we explore space, this planet is ours, and we will– we have to– “always choose Earth [and] always choose each other."

References
1. CNN. (2026, April 8). The overview effect: Astronauts in space. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/08/science/overview-effect-astronauts-in-space
2. SAGE Journals. (2009). Apollo and the environmental imagination. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2009.01825.
​3. The Conversation. (2024). Earthrise to Earthset: How the planet’s climate has changed since the photo that inspired the environmental movement. https://theconversation.com/earthrise-to-earthset-how-the-planets-climate-has-changed-since-the-photo-that-inspired-the-environmental-movement-279818