Astronauts of SpaceX Crew-2 Visit the National Park Service

Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz (fourth from left) welcomes SpaceX Crew-2 and NPS rangers at the Department of the Interior. NPS photo.

On June 9, 2022, members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-2 mission visited National Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a celebration of science, astronomy, art and exploration. The crew had returned to Earth the previous November after a record-setting six months on the International Space Station, and came to learn about the Park Service's work to protect dark skies.

The visit

Assistant Secretary Shannon Estenoz and several park rangers greeted astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough and Aki Hoshide at the Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building. Dozens of Interior employees came. Rader Lane, a ranger from Grand Canyon National Park — home of one of the Park Service's premier night sky festivals — moderated and spoke about night skies in the parks.

Parks from orbit

The astronauts showed a short film of their mission and a slideshow of national parks photographed from space:

• landscapes: Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone, the volcanic desolation of Craters of the Moon, the mountains of Glacier;
• cultural icons: the Gateway Arch and the National Mall.

Some images were almost abstract, hard to identify but beautiful from this new angle — a reminder that art, science and exploration have always shaped how parks are understood and protected.

Grand Canyon National Park from the International Space Station. NASA photo.

A Moran in the museum

The crew also toured the Interior Museum, where Thomas Moran's 1874 painting Grand Chasm of the Colorado had just returned after more than 20 years on display elsewhere. Crew pilot Megan McArthur and Ranger Lane talked about how art helped popularize and establish the national parks, and about light pollution, the stars and nature as seen from space — and what artists and explorers might still teach us about protecting landmarks on Earth and even sites on other worlds. It showed why the Park Service and NASA keep working together to share natural darkness, exploration and science literacy with millions of visitors a year.

NPS Deputy Director of Operations Shawn Benge (holding plaque) welcomes Crew-2 to the Interior Museum and Moran's Grand Chasm of the Colorado. NPS photo.

"Veiled from the night"

Ranger Lane closed by thanking NASA and Crew-2, and noted a paradox: never have people known so much about the stars, yet never have they been so cut off from them. We are among the first generations to pair the beauty of the night sky with knowledge of its vast extent — and the first to live where 80% of people in the United States can no longer see the Milky Way from home because of light pollution. National parks and other public lands, he said, have become the last sanctuaries of natural darkness, and the Park Service is honored to protect them.

Sources

Based on "Astronauts Visit National Park Service Headquarters," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The page's cover photograph of the crew inside their spacecraft, of uncertain origin, is replaced here by an NPS photograph.