The South Philly Side Of The Moon: Artemis II Astronaut Is A Phillies Fan

PHILADELPHIA, PA — On the far side of the moon Monday night, when NASA's Artemis II crew traveled farther out into the universe than any human in history, Philadelphia sports had a representative.

Mission specialist Christina Koch was born in Michigan and raised in North Carolina, but her husband is a Philadelphia area native. The Philly sports blood prevailed upon Koch, who took her Phillies jersey and Eagles hat to the International Space Station in 2019. In Red October 2022, she found time between astronaut training and mission prep in Houston to attend the Phillies playoff-clinching win.

Fandom is often mocked, sometimes rightfully so. Yet there is a docking arm from the world of athletics to the best wisdom humanity has brought back from the stars. It is not without meaning that someone like the 47-year-old Koch, who has wanted to be an astronaut since she was in kindergarten, who dedicated years to rigorous living and research at remote stations in the South Pole and Greenland, who became the first woman to ever leave low Earth orbit, who has advanced degrees in electrical engineering and has developed astrophysics instruments for NASA, still sports her Phils and Birds gear in space.

“Looking back at Earth...I found myself noticing not only the beauty of Earth," Koch said this week, in one of her transmissions made public by NASA, "But how much blackness there was around it, and how it just made it even more special."

Koch and her three crewmates, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen, reached the apogee of all known journeys at around 7 p.m. eastern time Monday night, while the Phillies were warming up in San Francisco. They were some 252,755 miles away from Earth. They went into a comms blackout for forty minutes on the far side of the moon. Away and out into space, they saw sights never seen with the naked eye, the rippling galactic plane and the dust of nebulae and star clusters shimmering.

But it was the Earth on which Koch shared her deepest reflections.

"It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive," she said. "We evolved on the same planet, and we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal. And the specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized when you notice how much else there is around it."

The clarity Koch expressed on looking back at Earth, the sense of the unity of planetary life, has been shared by others who have left orbit. It's common enough, a profound enough psychological transformation that scientists have classified it as something called the overview effect.

It's an image at scale of what it is to be buried in the thumping bloodred of the Bank on a summer night, alongside 42,000 other citizens of the planet Philadelphia, arbitrary lines of class, race, and politics erased. When the Phillies or the Birds are winning, when the inertia of the crowd is all but willing the result on the field, pride is collective. You may be run over in K Lot trying to leave the stadium twenty minutes later, but you are at an impossibly distant remove from those concerns in the heat of a game in south Philadelphia.

It is perhaps only sheer luck that Philly should have an emissary on Artemis II, which is due to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on Friday night. Koch happened to marry one of the millions of Philly sports nuts in the world. But that the passion for the Birds and Phils persisted beyond the confines of our planet and into outer space is not luck. It is characteristically Philadelphian.

And as the Phanatic-green globe glimmers nearer against an otherwise lifeless dark ether, it may recall that sea of red at the Bank, set in brilliant foreground to the distant night, a precious if fleeting unity against the farther vacuum of all the Bostons and Washingtons, all the Los Angeleses and the invisible stars.