per aspera ad astra

Naoko Takeuchi visiting the Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s and meeting an astronaut! She was visiting the Center to do research for her Sailor Moon side story, "The Lover of Princess Kaguya," which was later turned into the Sailor Moon S Movie.

Decades later, when a plushie of Artemis was spotted in the mission control center during the Artemis II mission, Naoko expressed surprise and delight:

“In the manga, he’s the little cat who sends instructions to the Sailor Guardians from the command room,” she said. “That was just a fantasy that existed only in the story, so to think that 30 years later Artemis would appear in NASA’s mission control, a place I’ve always admired, is incredible. I’m so jealous. Thank you for watching over humanity’s great achievement for ten days. You did a wonderful job.”

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.