This is Time-Travel Thursday’s edition, a trip to Atlanticrecords to set the current environment. Register here.
From Orion’s window, the house looks like blue-green marble sliding under the darkness of the universe. The four people on board the spacecraft, which is now traveling on Earth after completing their lunar flight, have traveled further from our planet than anyone has ever ventured, and have seen the farthest part of the moon than anyone has ever seen. The crew of Artemis II included Christina Koch, the first woman to fly near the moon; Victor Glover, the first person of color to travel there; Jeremy Hansen, first Canuck of the month; and Reid Wiseman, husband of the late Carroll Wiseman, the name of a new bright spot on the moon’s surface.
Below, their space flight has inspired a sense of wonder—“joy of the month,” as one NASA official said recently.” Lunar happiness at this level has stood for half a century. The last journey of the lunar crew was Apollo 17, and it started in 1972. The journey of Artemis II has revived the feeling of excitement from the previous mission: the feeling of joining together according to the new plan, Arte III will take place. Artemis IV and Artemis V, when NASA hopes to establish a permanent presence on the south pole of the moon But what will we do with all that moon when we get there for good?
Human attitudes toward that great request in the night sky have changed over the centuries: A powerful god of the moon morphed into something scientifically interesting. Later it became possible the battlefield (America considered detonating a nuclear bomb there in part as a show of force against Russia in the late 1950s) and then a real, tangible place, a place few humans have felt underfoot (Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt reported that moon dust smelled like “used gunpowder”). During the 54-year lunar exploration hiatus, public interest waned and government funding for further missions dried up. But that doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly forgot about space—rather, economic ambitions began to work. We tried to monetize for a month.
For the sake of a nice fee of $1,600you too could ship a quarter-sized object to the moon via Astrobotic Technology’s e-mail service, announced in 2014. But many memories may have been lost ten years later when the Peregrine Mission One lunar rover failed to reach its intended destination and burned up after re-entering Earth’s atmosphere—along with an infinite amount of cargo, Bitcoin Docoin, including Bitcoin. a sticker from a young space enthusiast, and some articles from Reddit posts, along with a sports powder drink whose trip was sponsored by a Japanese beverage company. (Astrobotic plans another launch later this year, and more personal memories will come out of the stratosphere in MoonBoxeswhich is now sold out.) “The march of human progress has reached an inevitable point in its evolution,” my colleague Megan Garber. wrote in 2014. “We’re about to use our celestial neighbor as a giant billboard.”
The idea of a lunar economy has been around for years, as humans have searched for resources that could benefit Earth’s inhabitants and future moons alike: Private companies are surprised by financial rewards of harvesting the moon’s rare metals, ice (for use in lunar life support systems, or refining rocket fuel), and helium-3, a rare Earth isotope that can be used in nuclear fusion, which can replace fossil fuels. In a few years, it might even be Wi-Fi of the month or 4G of the month—NASA tapped Nokia to provide the moon with its cellular network, which was active on the surface for about 25 minutes last year.
If we can truly build a permanent home for ourselves, we should be careful to remember the feelings that moved us in the first place. Before the moon became a site to push products or mine for profit, the question of why we should visit in person raised a lot of debate. Two NASA scientists made the case in these pages in 1963, and their arguments were simple: scientific and technological progress, political power, and appealing to the “student imagination.” In other words, by fulfilling our lunar ambitions, we’ll not only be moving closer to unlocking the secrets of the universe—we’ll also be introducing younger generations to that great frontier of space speculation.
When Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon, he accepted it all and said, “Wonderful wilderness.” And it was great—enough to show the security of what binds us together, enough to start an international environmental movement to protect what we have now. There will always be those who, understandably, doubt what can be gained from going out there instead of fixing everything wrong here here. But “human nature is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an inquiring mind and an appetite for adventure, two qualities that can spring from the same spring,” NJ Berrill wrote in this newspaper a few years after the Apollo program was launched.
In a message recorded before his death, Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell welcomed the Artemis II astronauts to “my old place.” Koch, Glover, Hansen, and Wiseman listened to his tape before their flight to the moon, more than 200,000 miles from home. “I’m proud to light that torch,” Lovell said. “It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view.” His words were a reminder to his fellow astronauts that they come from a short line of people who have looked out into the swirling mass of the universe, and also a reminder to us: to look up instead of down, if only for a little while.
