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Good morning. Despite the disappointment of the unsuccessful satellite launch from Spaceport Cornwall, it’s been an exciting few days for those who look up to the heavens.

The James Webb Space Telescope observed a region of rapid star formation in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy. It goes beyond awe inspiring images to help us understand how galaxies evolve and how planets form. Another space telescope discovered an Earth sized planet 100 light years away. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite located this planet at a distance from its star in the habitable zone, where in the words of Goldilocks it would be just right for life to develop. And speaking of alien life, the US National Intelligence Office reported over 100 Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon which don’t seem to have an obvious explanation. Now it is a long way from these reports to the claims of some newspapers that the aliens are here, but all of these observations raise some fascinating questions.

These questions of the nature of the cosmos and our place within it were explored in a public discussion panel that I was part of with Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, Avril Haynes, the head of US intelligence, Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It was a privilege in such company to be invited to say how Christian theology might contribute to the ethics of space exploration, and what it means to be human in a cosmos with the possibility of other life.

The location of the discussion was significant in that it was held in the National Cathedral in Washington DC. There, its stained glass ‘Space Window’ features stars and orbiting planets, and in the very middle in a nitrogen-filled capsule is a 3.6 billion-year-old rock brought back from the Moon by Apollo 11. At a ceremony, Neil Armstrong said, ‘we present unto you this fragment of creation from beyond the earth to be imbedded in the fabric of this house of prayer for all people’.

The Christian tradition stemming from Jesus of Nazareth has had much experience, both in contributions and mistakes when it comes to the use of the Earth’s natural resources and to attitudes to those who are perceived as the other. And in its claim that God can be known means that for me, each fragment of creation in the physical universe, is not just a source of awe but an encouragement to worship, a subversion of human arrogance, and a reminder that even space is a gift to be used responsibly and not exploited.

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