On 21 July 1969, Neil Armstrong swung open the hatch of his spacecraft and clambered down a short ladder towards the surface of the moon. The Apollo 11 moon mission came only 66 years after Orville Wright made the first successful flight in an aeroplane. Armstrong captured a sense of that progression in the indelible first words he spoke on the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
That was nearly 57 years ago. No human has visited the moon since the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972.
As early as this week, that may change – sort of. Nasa is planning to send four astronauts on a 10-day loop around our lunar neighbour, on a mission called Artemis II. The Artemis II crew won’t land – that will fall to Artemis IV, a mission still probably several years away.
Will it be possible for Nasa to recapture some of the lunar fever of the 1960s with these new missions? Back then hundreds of millions around the world watched Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land at Tranquility Base, with Mike Collins orbiting above them, and the three astronauts returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York and a world tour on which they met the pope and the queen (Aldrin described her as “surprisingly small and buxom”!), and visited Mumbai, Bangkok, the Berlin Wall and everywhere in between.
But that was in the middle of the cold war, when the race to the moon was one of many fronts in the battle between the west and the Soviet Union. In his famous speech of 1962, John F Kennedy went further, casting the Apollo mission as a response to some innate human instinct to explore, to compete, to take on herculean challenges: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
There is little of that political or rhetorical urgency today. Nasa has yo-yoed between targeting the moon and Mars as US presidents have come and gone, and Donald Trump – who put the focus back on the moon in 2017 – has justified the mission only in bland generalities about American leadership, “lunar economic development”, and preparing the groundwork for a visit to the red planet at some point in the distant future.
As well as focusing on the scientific benefits of the mission, Nasa initially made some attempt to present Artemis as making history by highlighting the fact that it would include the first black astronaut, Victor Glover, and first female astronaut, Christina Koch, to reach the moon. But when Trump returned to office with an aggressive “anti-woke” agenda, the space agency shamefully fell into line and deleted the section hailing the historic nature of Glover and Koch’s roles from the Artemis website.
You can’t do something for the first time twice, and these missions will never have the world-historical importance of Armstrong’s “giant leap”. If Artemis II successfully swings around the moon and comes back, it will only be aping what Apollo 8 did in 1968. And if Artemis IV makes it to the moon’s surface, it will be repeating the achievement of six previous Apollo missions.
To that extent it may only be as exciting and memorable as the seventh expedition to the north pole, Everest or the Mariana trench. Surely a future mission to Mars or even the uncrewed spacecraft currently on their way to Jupiter’s moons, which may end up finding evidence of alien life, are more likely to ignite public enthusiasm.
But don’t write off the moon just yet. Throughout history it has held its own special fascination – as powerful in its way as the gravitational pull it exerts on Earth’s tides.
It has provided artistic inspiration since Neolithic times, if not before. Romantic painters such as Joseph Wright of Derby viewed it as a symbol of longing because it was unreachable. It fascinated surrealists such as Dalí and Man Ray, and in this century Katie Paterson, who created a lightbulb simulating moonlight, and Luke Jerram, whose intricately detailed 1:500,000 replica has toured the globe (this one). Musicians have made constant use of its imagery, from Beethoven and Debussy to Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Ezra Furman and Phoebe Bridgers. “Look at her,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges of the moon in 1976. “She is your mirror.”
Such is the inherently mysterious and unknowable nature of the moon that conspiracy theories about the lunar landings sprang up almost as soon as the final Apollo mission splashed back down in the south Pacific. It was almost as if it was more plausible that the mission had been faked than that humanity had succeeded in transforming the infinitely malleable symbol in the night sky into something rock-solid that could be reached and conquered simply by solving the right engineering problems.
After all, it has only been relatively recently in human history that we have been able to see it as a physical object like this. Galileo first sketched its rough and cratered surface in the 17th century, and it was only in 1959 that we discovered what its far side looks like, thanks to the first Soviet probe. Before Apollo 11, we didn’t even know how it had formed; it was the 22kg (48lb) of moon rocks brought back by Armstrong and Aldrin that provided evidence that it was the result of a collision billions of years ago between the young Earth and a Mars-like planet dubbed Theia.
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins looked directly into the mirror of the moon – and interestingly their impressions were not gushing. In fact, they betrayed a certain trepidation. Aldrin termed the scene at Tranquility Base “magnificent desolation” and Armstrong, reversing the thought, said it had a “stark beauty”. Collins, who circled the moon 30 times as he waited for his colleagues, was the most wary: “I did not sense any great invitation on the part of the moon for us to come into its domain. I sensed more a … almost a hostile place, a scary place.”
Very soon, we may get that kind of first-hand insight into the moon from Koch, Glover and their Artemis colleagues, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen. I wouldn’t be surprised if their trip prompts at least a little bit of lunacy back here on Earth.
