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 question about his race.
On Easter Sunday, Glover reflected on God's creation and the Bible, saying in part, "As we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation, I think, for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I 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 think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world - whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not - this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same 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 first African American to fly around the moon. Glover replied that the mission belonged not just to “black history” or "women's history," but to human history.
Glover said he hopes that one day people will look past race. “I hope we push that one day,” 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 first crewed test flight in NASA’s Artemis campaign and the first to carry astronauts aboard the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The four-person crew will spend 10 days on a loop around the moon to confirm Orion’s ability to operate in deep space before next year’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 first woman to pass to the lunar distance, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency is the first Canadian on such a voyage, noted the Daily Citizen.
An elder from Glover’s church said he is praying that God’s name will be glorified, according to The Christian Chronicle.
“He’s just a top-shelf guy and down to earth, but with all the experiences and accolades,” Brent Hankins, an elder at 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 love 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 think we all had tears in our eyes. When we got to about five seconds in 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 in general 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 more than 40 aircraft, more than 400 carrier landings and 24 combat missions.
He was selected in 2013 as one of eight members of NASA’s 21st 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 four children.
Glover told The Christian Chronicle in a 2023 podcast interview that his belief and his professional life are “interwoven.”
“My career is fed by my faith,” he said. “Anytime I do something that’s pretty risky, I pray. Before I fly, every time I fly. Definitely when you go sit on top of a rocket ship.”
He added, “In the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”
He had been in the military for 26 years, and he said that working at NASA frequently produced conversations about creation and faith.
“We talk about our solar system, and I will often refer to the beauty of 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 each other like some people like 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 two trace a similar sequence.
“Theoretical physics has actually not said that what’s in the Bible is not how the universe began,” he said.
He put the moon’s age at about 4.5 billion years and said biblical genealogies do not need to conflict with that figure, since the 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 was able to worship in space,” he said. He called the experience “special and not special at the same time,” adding that it gave him a new sense of why the ritual held its significance regardless of location.
After returning to Earth, he said the view from orbit had changed his thinking about humanity’s place in the universe.
NASA had searched for life elsewhere and found it only on Earth, he said, a realization that made the planet seem small but profoundly important. 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.
