The post-mission press conference was held in Press Room 3 at Houston.
When the four crewmembers took the stage, camera flashes erupted all at once. Commander Davis cleared his throat. The man who’d stayed ice-calm through the entire mission looked, strangely, like he was about to burst.
“First, I have an announcement.”
PR liaison Morris tried to cut in, but Davis held up a hand.
“On the far side of the Moon, we found something.”
The room went quiet. NASA’s head of public affairs was signaling furiously from the wings. Davis ignored him.
“It appeared on one of the exterior cameras as we passed over.”
An image filled the screen. The lunar far side — a grey expanse of overlapping craters. And in the middle of it, a shape: a oddly neat rectangle casting a shadow. Murmuring spread through the room.
“Is that some kind of structure?” a reporter in the front row called out.
“No,” Davis said. “It’s a sign.”
The image zoomed in. The rectangular shadow did look exactly like a sign. There was something written on it. The resolution was too low to read.
“I imagine you’re wondering if we landed to investigate — but this was an orbital mission, so no, we didn’t touch down.”
The room was in chaos. Morris was desperately trying to pass Davis a note. Davis kept going.
“However, we ran the image through AI analysis and were able to partially reconstruct the text.”
The screen changed. A blurry string of characters appeared.
The room froze.
“As you can see,” Davis said.
The screen read:
THIS SIDE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Three seconds of silence.
Then pilot Chen lost it. The other two couldn’t hold on either. All three were gone.
“I’m sorry,” Davis managed, tears at the corners of his eyes. “Six days. Four people. One spacecraft. It just… happened.”
The image was an AI-generated joke. Davis had made it himself.
Morris had his face in his hands. The PR director was leaning against the wall, staring at the ceiling. About half the press corps was laughing. The other half was not.
NASA issued an official statement the following week: “The conduct of the crew was inappropriate. A formal reprimand has been issued.”
The image, meanwhile, lapped the internet at a speed that left the mission’s actual science discoveries in the dust.
The following month, NASA’s online gift shop began selling T-shirts printed with THIS SIDE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK. They outsold every other piece of official Artemis II merchandise combined.
In a later interview, Davis put it this way:
“When I looked out at the far side, there really was nothing there. Just craters. And somehow that was the most stunning thing I’d ever seen — a place that had gone billions of years without a single pair of eyes on it. All that silence. I couldn’t figure out how to say that seriously. So I didn’t.”