FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris watches Artemis II's lunar flyby with the measured fascination of a country whose astronauts aren't in the capsule but whose engineers are in the components. Le Monde deploys a massive live blog and publishes 'never-before-seen photos of the far side of the Moon' -- an editorial choice that favors raw imagery over geopolitical commentary. RFI frames the event through the record: the astronauts 'break the human distance record,' surpassing Apollo 13. The detail that holds Paris's attention is the 40 minutes of radio silence, when Orion vanished behind the Moon and Houston lost contact. For a country that lived with the silence of the submarine Minerve for 50 years, that signal loss resonates differently. France also reads Artemis through the European Service Module built under ESA supervision with major Airbus Defence & Space involvement. This isn't an American show -- it's a program Europe participates in, and whose future access it's negotiating. Le Monde mentions neither the program's staggering cost nor the war in Iran: space remains, in the French press, a sanctuary where science shields from politics.