Christian Artemis II pilot Victor Glover reflects on God’s creation from space

Victor Glover, the Christian US Navy captain piloting NASA’s Artemis II mission, is being lauded for glorifying God in space and for his response to a matter about his race.  

On Easter Sunday, Glover reflected on God’s creation and the Bible, saying partially, “As we’re to date from Earth and searching back at the great thing about creation, I believe, for me, one in all the really vital personal perspectives that I actually have up here is that I can really see Earth as one thing. … You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”

He added, “I believe as we go into Easter Sunday, fascinated by all of the cultures all around the globe – whether you rejoice it or not, whether you think in God or not – that is a possibility for us to recollect where we’re, who we’re, and that we’re the identical thing, and that we’ve got to get through this together.”

Ahead of the April 1 mission, a reporter asked how he felt about becoming the primary African American to fly across the moon. Glover replied that the mission belonged not simply to “black history” or “women’s history,” but to human history. 

Glover said he hopes that at some point people will look past race. “I hope we push that at some point,” he said in a Spectrum News video posted on X by Eric Daugherty of RightLineNews.

“It’s about human history, humanity, not ‘black history,’ not ‘women’s history,’ but that it becomes human history,” Glover remarked.

Artemis II is the primary crewed test flight in NASA’s Artemis campaign and the primary to hold astronauts aboard the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The four-person crew will spend 10 days on a loop across the moon to verify Orion’s ability to operate in deep space before next yr’s Artemis III mission.

The Artemis IV mission is planned to land astronauts on the lunar surface, with later flights targeting Mars.

Reid Wiseman is commanding the mission, with Glover serving as pilot.

Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut, is the primary woman to pass to the lunar distance, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency is the primary Canadian on such a voyage, noted the Daily Citizen.

An elder from Glover’s church said he’s praying that God’s name might be glorified, in keeping with The Christian Chronicle.

“He’s only a top-shelf guy and right down to earth, but with all of the experiences and accolades,” Brent Hankins, an elder on the Southeast Church of Christ in Friendswood, Texas, the congregation about 6 miles from NASA’s Space Center Houston that Glover and his wife, Dionna, call home, said.

Hankins said that as a shepherd, he has come to like and support the Glover family, and to cheer and pray for them.

“It was a rush,” he said of witnessing the launch. “I mean, I believe all of us had tears in our eyes. When we got to about five seconds within the countdown, the magnitude of that was pretty overwhelming.”

Glover was born in Pomona, California, graduated from Ontario High School in 1994 and holds a bachelor’s degree normally engineering and three master’s degrees. He served as a test pilot on the F/A-18 Hornet, Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler, logging 3,500 flight hours in greater than 40 aircraft, greater than 400 carrier landings and 24 combat missions.

He was chosen in 2013 as one in all eight members of NASA’s twenty first astronaut class and in 2018 was assigned to Crew-1 as pilot. He later served 168 days as a flight engineer on the International Space Station, or ISS. He and his wife have 4 children.

Glover told The Christian Chronicle in a 2023 podcast interview that his belief and his skilled life are “interwoven.”

“My profession is fed by my faith,” he said. “Anytime I do something that’s pretty dangerous, I pray. Before I fly, each time I fly. Definitely once you go sit on top of a rocket ship.”

He added, “In the military, there’s a saying that there aren’t any atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”

He had been within the military for 26 years, and he said that working at NASA steadily produced conversations about creation and faith.

“We speak about our solar system, and I’ll often seek advice from the great thing about creation,” he said. “People hear that, and it’s like a trigger word for certain folks. But that’s in church and at NASA.”

He said he doesn’t accept that faith and science are in opposition.

“They don’t actually work against one another like some people prefer to claim that they do,” he said, drawing parallels between the Big Bang account of the universe’s origins and the Genesis creation narrative, saying the 2 trace the same sequence.

“Theoretical physics has actually not said that what’s within the Bible just isn’t how the universe began,” he said.

He put the moon’s age at about 4.5 billion years and said biblical genealogies don’t have to conflict with that figure, for the reason that Gospel’s power lies not in chronological precision but in its message.

Glover said he carried prepackaged communion supplies to the ISS and received the sacrament each week. “I used to be in a position to worship in space,” he said. He called the experience “special and never special at the identical time,” adding that it gave him a recent sense of why the ritual held its significance no matter location.

After returning to Earth, he said the view from orbit had modified his fascinated by humanity’s place within the universe.

NASA had looked for life elsewhere and located it only on Earth, he said, a realization that made the planet seem small but profoundly vital. He recalled visiting Israel, where an Arab student addressed him as “brother.” “We are all brothers and sisters,” Glover said.

The last crewed mission to the moon was Apollo 17, which launched on Dec. 7, 1972.

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