What Will Humanity Do With the Moon?
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
From the window of Orion, home looks like a pale-blue marble slipping under the dark felt of the universe. The four people aboard the spacecraft, now earthbound after finishing their lunar flyby, have traveled farther from our planet than any person has ever ventured, and have seen more of the moon’s far side than any person has ever beheld. The Artemis II crew includes Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon; Victor Glover, the first person of color to journey there; Jeremy Hansen, the first lunar-bound Canuck; and Reid Wiseman, husband to the late Carroll Wiseman, the namesake of a newly identified bright spot on the moon’s surface.
Down here, their space adventure has stirred feelings of awe—“moon joy,” as one NASA officer recently put it. Moon joy at this scale has been on hiatus for the better half of a century. The last crewed lunar expedition was Apollo 17, and it took off in 1972. Artemis II’s voyage has revived a thrilling sensation from missions past: the feeling of inching together toward the edge of new knowledge. If all goes according to plan, there will be an Artemis III and an Artemis IV and an Artemis V, at which point NASA hopes to establish a permanent presence on the lunar south pole. But what will we do with all that moon when we get up there for good?
Humanity’s attitudes toward that great orb in the night sky have shifted over the centuries: A powerful lunar deity morphed into an object of scientific fascination. Later it became a possible arena for war (America considered detonating a nuclear bomb there partly as a show of force against Russia in the late 1950s) and then a real, tangible place, one that few humans have felt underfoot (the Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt reported that lunar dust smelled like “spent gunpowder”). During the 54-year lunar-exploration freeze, public interest waned and government funding for more missions dried up. But that didn’t mean everybody suddenly forgot about space—instead, the cogs of economic ambition went right to work. We tried to monetize the moon.
For the handsome fee of $1,600, you too could have shipped a quarter-size object to the moon via Astrobotic Technology’s moon-mail service, announced in 2014. But many mementos were likely lost a decade later when the company’s Peregrine Mission One lunar lander failed to reach its destination and burned up upon reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere—along with other cargo, including, and not limited to, a Bitcoin Genesis Plate, a physical Dogecoin, a sticker from a young space enthusiast, and some copies of Reddit posts, as well as a powdered sports drink whose voyage was sponsored by a Japanese beverage company. (Astrobotic is planning another launch for later this year, and more personal keepsakes will exit the stratosphere in MoonBoxes, which are now sold out.) “The march of human progress has come to an inevitable point in its evolution,” my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2014. “We’re about to use our celestial neighbor as an enormous billboard.”
The idea of a lunar economy has floated around for years, as humans have searched for resources that could benefit Earth dwellers and future moon dwellers alike: Private companies are intrigued by the financial rewards of harvesting the moon’s rare metals, ice (to use in life-support systems on the moon, or to refine for rocket fuel), and helium-3, a rare-on-Earth isotope that could be used in nuclear fusion, which could in turn replace fossil fuels. In a few years, there may even be lunar Wi-Fi or lunar 4G—NASA tapped Nokia to furnish the moon with its own cellular network, which was operational on the surface for roughly 25 minutes last year.
If we do indeed manage to build a permanent space home for ourselves, we should take care to remember the sentiments that propelled us up there in the first place. Before the moon became a site to push product or dig for profit, the question of why we should visit it in person roused much debate. Two NASA scientists made the case in these pages in 1963, and their reasoning was simple: scientific and technological advancement, political clout, and an appeal “to the imagination of the student.” In other words, by fulfilling our lunar aspirations, not only will we creep closer to unlocking the universe’s secrets—we will also introduce young generations to that great frontier of celestial speculation.
When Buzz Aldrin became the second person to walk on the moon, he took it all in and remarked, “Magnificent desolation.” And it was magnificent—enough to show the precarity of what yokes us to one another, enough to kick-start a worldwide environmental movement to protect what we have now. There will always be those who, understandably, doubt what can be gained from going out there rather than from fixing everything that’s wrong right here. But “human nature is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an inquiring mind and an itch for adventure, two qualities that may well spring from the same fount,” N. J. Berrill wrote in this magazine a few years after the Apollo program was established.
In a message recorded before his death, the Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell welcomed Artemis II’s astronauts to “my old neighborhood.” Koch, Glover, Hansen, and Wiseman listened to his tape before their lunar flyby, more than 200,000 miles from home. “I’m proud to pass that torch on to you,” 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 space travelers that they come from a short line of people who have peered out at the swirling mass of the universe, and also a reminder to us: to look up instead of down, if only for a little while.