There’s a chance to change the way we think about the moon – but will we take it?
It has been a very big week for the moon: there has been a lunar eclipse, a mission to its surface sent by India, and the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings.
But only one of those three events really received the coverage it deserved, and that was the one from five decades ago. That wonky amount of interest threatens to eclipse the way we think about the moon and space exploration more generally.
This was the week that the Indian space agency sent a mission that should be the first time the country will conduct a soft landing onto the lunar surface. And while that achievement will be a rare one, it won’t be unique: India will become the fourth country to do so, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.
The moon landing anniversary received far more attention, but the US didn’t actually do anything new to merit all of the excitement. Getting to the lunar surface is of course an achievement – it might be the achievement of human history – but it is also one that happened 50 years ago, in another age.
The week was filled up with some new announcements about the US government and Nasa’s plans to head back to the moon, including an announcement by Mike Pence that the Orion capsule that could one day carry astronauts back to the lunar surface is ready for final testing. But those are just promises, and the frenzied excitement threatens to obscure what is really happening today, and in the future.
It would be a mistake to think that those achievements of the past have anything much to say about what the moon could and should look like as humans head back to it. It gets to fundamental questions of who owns the moon, and how we should treat the new place we come across.
The moon will be an incredibly valuable resource in years to come: not only does it remain a valuable object of study in itself, it is likely to serve as a stopping-off point that could make travel further into the solar system much easier. As such, it will become yet another resource for the world to fight over.
Rather than history and the achievements of decades gone by, we might do better to think a little more about science fiction
As the space race hots up, that fighting is likely to rhyme with the bloody history of colony and empire. The US seems to believe it ought to have supremacy; billionaires are eyeing it as a possible escape from the dangers at home – climate change – which threaten all of Earth.
Other launches like those from China and India offer a way out of this depressing repetition, as the world fights to control valuable resources all over again. It is worth turning our attention to those other space agencies – in the hope that this time around it could be different.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that having different countries in the race mean it will go any differently: it is just as likely that this time around we have different countries fighting, but all to the same selfish and rapacious ends. We should be even more ambitious, and try and change the race rather than the runners.
Rather than history and the achievements of decades gone by, we might do better to think a little more about science fiction. Authors like Becky Chambers have shown that, in her words, space is for everyone; Kim Stanley Robinson has written about the dangers of trying to ignore that fact and simply recreating our current geopolitical difficulties on a new world.
The moon is an unbelievable, magic, alien world that offers the opportunity to change how we live and what we value. But so far it looks as if we are treating it with the same combination of acquisitiveness and disregard that the western world has treated any other place that could be a possible colony.