WSJ:  There’s No Separation of Church and Space

CWR:  Artemis II moon mission ‘a great development,’ Vatican Observatory director says

Artemis 2 pilot, Victor Glover, gave a little Easter sermon from space, so the militant atheists on Earth pissed their pants and strongly objected to government astronauts talking about religion.

Bugs Bunny covered this in Mad as a Mars Hare. 

Jesuit Father Richard A. D’Souza, director of the Vatican Observatory also commented on Artemis 2.

The Artemis program is a great development from the perspective of human spaceflight. Since the Apollo missions, our understanding of the moon and our scientific techniques to answer many of the unanswered questions have improved.

Father D’Souza isn’t being fair to Catholic astronomy.  He could have mentioned that the Church needed astronomy and observatories to determine the lunar-solar timing of Easter.  He could have gone back to the 16th century when Copernicus dedicated his work to Pope Paul III or Pope Gregory XIII directing Jesuit astronomers to invent the much more accurate Gregorian calendar.

Don’t even start on Galileo’s trial for heresy.  That was political machinations more than anything to do with science. 

The interesting thing is that there is still a Vatican Observatory staffed by astronomers.  What are they working on? 

A credible observatory is expected to be in an isolated, high altitude location, like the top-ranked Muana Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

The Sphinx Observatory in the Swiss Alps looks looks so much like the lair for a James Bond villain, it was a filming location for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).

The Vatican Observatory is south of Rome, and looks like this.

Lovely.  I bet they have great food.  There may be a secret Roman Catholic religious order just dedicated to trimming those hedges.

They have a telescope, I checked. 

That’s Pope Leo XIV.  He visited the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo last year to mark the 56th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing.

Then Pope Leo called Buzz Aldrin.  That’s cool.  I’d have called William Shatner too.

If my Italian is solid, ‘Castel Gandolfo’ means Gandalf’s Castle.  J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, so that may explain why the Vatican Observatory is there, rather than attached to a monastery up on some rocky peak.

The Meteora Monastery would be a great site for the Vatican Observatory.

It’s got ‘meteor’ in the name, so you are already half-way there.  Unfortunately it’s in Greece, so the Pope would have to go up against the Patriarch of Constantinople.  Christians have external threats, and don’t have time to fight amongst themselves.

The Artemis 2 photo at the top, invites this comparison.

Googling ‘astronomy and Islam’ yields:

Astronomy played a vital role in medieval Islamic civilization, driven by the need to determine prayer times, the qibla (direction of Mecca), and the lunar calendar.

And there is this:

Ibn al-Haytham, (c. 965 – c. 1040), was a mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age from what we currently call Iraq.  Referred to as “the father of modern optics”, his works were frequently cited by Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Johannes Kepler.

A thousand years ago, Islam helped to advance civilization with their contributions to science.  That is probably enough to replace the Canadian with a Muslim for the next Artemis mission.