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Endpapers from “The Moon” by James Nasmyth and James Carpenter (1871).
Left: The crater Copernicus; Right: The lunar Apennines, with the crater Archimedes
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The Economist in Association with Profile Books Ltd. and PublicAffairs
Originally published in 2019 by Profile Books Ltd. in Great Britain.
First US Edition: June 2019
Published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The PublicAffairs name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Names: Morton, Oliver, author.
Title: The moon : a history for the future / Oliver Morton.
Description: New York : Public Affairs, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004627 (print) | LCCN 2019005523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541768062 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541774322 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Moon—Popular works.
Classification: LCC QB581.9 (ebook) | LCC QB581.9 .M67 2019 (print) | DDC 523.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004627
ISBNs: 978-1-5417-7432-2 (hardcover), 978-1-5417-6806-2 (ebook)
E3-20190502-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
ITS PHASES
I—REFLECTIONS
ITS SIZE AND APPEARANCE
II—THE FACE OF THE MOON
ITS ORBIT
III—APOLLO
ITS SURFACE
IV—BOUNDARIES
TRAJECTORIES
V—REASONS
VISITS
VI—THE RETURN
EXPOSURE
VII—ON THE MOON
STORIES
VIII—THE UNWORLD
CODA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE FOR THE MOON
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
REFERENCES
INDEX
ENDPAPER
To John Loft, my uncle, John Hynes, my father-in-law, and John Morton, my brother beloved all
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Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
—JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
—PAUL BOWLES, The Sheltering Sky
Are we going to lunch? Or are we going to the Moon?
—RIP VAN RONKEL, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN AND JAMES O’HANLON, Destination Moon
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Nearside
The Moon’s Western Hemisphere
The Moon’s Eastern Hemisphere
The Apollo Landing Sites
A Unified Geologic Time Scale
North Pole
South Pole
The Farside
INTRODUCTION
STRAWBERRY MOON
June 19th 2016, San Mateo County, California
THE CALIFORNIA SKY WAS WARM AND BLUE, ITS LIGHT STILL bright but softening. Shadows lengthened across dry grass towards San Francisco Bay as the train trundled south. In London, though, it was four in the morning, and it was in London that I had started my day. I was a third of a planet from home and I was tired.
I had come to Silicon Valley to talk to people about space and technology. In preparation, my head resting against the window of the carriage, I was reading a scientific paper on places where one might site a moonbase. I was not taking in the arguments all that well, but I was impressed by their breadth. The paper’s Moon was mapped by laser, camera and radar, the shadows in its craters and sunlight on its peaks modelled by computers, its minerals assayed using electromagnetic radiation of every frequency—and neutrons, to boot. The data were as varied in source as in type; some came from Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar mission, launched in 2008; some from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched the following year and had, six years later, sent its handlers a startling 630 terabytes of data. Some were older: from the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod rovers, from America’s Apollo landings, from the Lunar Orbiter missions that had paved the way for them.
From the range and weight of this material came pros and cons for various possible locations; a communications relay here is better than one there, this crater is more easily traversed than that one, the richer thorium deposits there do not make up for the more favourable solar power conditions here, and so on. The paper was not just making a case for this spot on the rim of Peary, a crater near the North Pole, versus that spot between Shackleton and Sverdrup, near the South. It was a performance—a demonstration to a world in general little interested in the Moon that, now all this detail was available, this was the sort of argument people could and should be having.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it, rising full.
I didn’t catch the moment it broke the horizon; you very rarely do, unless you have planned accordingly. But it was still at the bottom of the sky
, down where the logic of landscape requires the mind’s eye to invest it with a size beyond that of its image as subtended on the retina. It looked as big as it looked distant, washed blue by the still-light sky, a depth as much as a brightness. You would never suspect that its spectral face was as stone-solid as the raised-up sea rocks of the California hills below.
It was, I realised later, a wonderfully apt place from which to see it. The train taking me from San Francisco airport to Mountain View was passing Menlo Park, where in the 1960s making maps of the Moon had been a rite of passage for the newly minted “astrogeologists” of the US Geological Survey. On Mount Hamilton, in the hills over which it was rising, is the Lick Observatory, where a pioneering photographic survey of the Moon was undertaken more than a century ago, and where those Menlo Park geologists would be sent, some eager and some unwilling, to inspect the object of their study.
Up ahead of me was NASA’s Ames Research Center, the reason for my trip to Mountain View, home to the wind tunnels used to define the blunt re-entry-ready shape of the Apollo command modules, and home for a while to some of the rocks those modules brought back. Behind me, in San Francisco, was the home of Ambrose Bierce, author of one of America’s great tales of the fantastic, “The Moonlit Road”. Many gothic writers had used moonlight for unearthly effect before. In his story of three seemingly contradictory accounts, Bierce created a scene in which the flat, spectral light illuminated three truths, or none. A smooth light of inconsistencies; a single Moon of many stories.
The links were not all in the past. The little cluster of space-business start-ups outside the Ames centre had, until recently, housed Moon Express, a company which planned to launch the first commercial payload to the Moon. A few kilometres closer, on Bay View Boulevard, were the headquarters of Google, which was at the time the sponsor of a $30m set of prizes for landing a rover on the Moon which Moon Express, among others, was trying to win. On the other side of the tracks, in the hills above Stanford, was the home of Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who had been an early backer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and nurtured his own plans for the Moon. It was at a meeting in that house that the moonbase-siting study I was reading had been conceived.
And beneath those hills, in the depths of the San Andreas Fault, the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate were responding to the full Moon’s spring tide, just as they do every month. Tides do not, in general, trigger earthquakes, but they pull strongly and insistently enough for the supremely sensitive instruments of the seismologists to feel the Earth creaking gently at their touch.
But as the train took me down the valley towards the matte-silver-blue Moon, I thought about none of that. I was simply struck by how extraordinary it felt to be seeing the same object, at the same time, in two such strikingly different ways—to be surprised while reading the science by the beauty of the thing itself outside. It was not the feeling Walt Whitman expressed in “When I heard the learned astronomer”, contrasting the drone of dry proofs and stale columns of figures with the silent, sublime power of the starlit night itself. It was its reverse: a deep sense that the different ways of seeing reinforced each other. A cognitive consonance of Moon as many stories, Moon as might be and Moon as always was, Moon longed for and Moon happened upon.
HAPPENED UPON. THE MOON, INCONSTANT IN APPEARANCE BUT constant in presence, is often seen but rarely looked for. Sometimes the wash of its light on buildings or landscape prompts you to seek it out in the sky, sometimes the clouds lit by its glow are hard to miss. More often, though, you just come across it unexpectedly, as I did on that train—or on the morning I am writing this, when the sliver of its waning crescent in the pre-dawn sky surprised me through my attic window. My decision to write this book has, unsurprisingly, made me more Moon aware, more likely to seek it out; I like to imagine that your reading it may do the same, at least for a while. But still I see the Moon as much by chance, I think, as by design, catching it from the corner of my eye.
This is appropriate. The Moon is essentially peripheral. It is rarely anybody’s central concern, as a mountain or a sea might be, a person or a nation. It is off to one side, a lesser companion tagging along through the years. It differs from the rest of the yet further cosmos only by being close enough to see by day. In other ways it is as distant and as ineffable a part of the sky as the stars beyond.
But it is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours. It is near enough for its pale fire to light the night, for its pull to raise the waters, to take the blame for madness. Its material is the same as that beneath our feet, and human feet have trodden it there as we do here. It defines the sky. It completes the Earth.
Far-off but been-there: unique but not inherently fascinating. Its story to date is in essence a simple one of achievement and abandonment. Its physical mysteries are few. The processes that formed its face are far simpler to understand than the chiselling and planing by which tectonic plates shuffle scraped-up sediments and submarine volcanoes into green hills above dry California valleys. Little of consequence has happened to it, and it may be that little ever will.
But something, at least, is going to happen soon. When I began this book there were five people alive who had walked the Moon. When it went to the printers, there were four. It is my firm belief they are handily outnumbered—perhaps by orders of magnitude—by the people now alive who will follow in their footsteps. The Return to the Moon is coming, and it will be undertaken by men and women from many more places, and with more agendas, than were in the American vanguard of 50 years ago. The space in my double vision on the southbound train, the space between engineering analysis trying so hard to become real and the real in the sky looking so determinedly unreal, will be filled. That space, the space between the Moon of the past and the Moons of the future, is the space of this book, a space of fact, speculation and digression, of ideals and inconsistencies, of the Moon itself, toe-stub certain as the rocks of the Diablo Hills, and of the Earthly ideas and concerns its peripheral light throws into sometimes irreconcilable relief.
Some fear or claim to fear or maybe even want to fear that a moonbased Moon would be a diminished Moon, a disenchanted Moon. They want the sky Moon only, not the rock Moon nor the scientific paper’s Moon waiting for a base; they need those stories to contradict. Others want a Moon that is at one with their Earth, one at the far end of a journey longer than any the Earth can contain but which remains a journey like other journeys, thrilling, perhaps strange, but not, at heart, out of this world: the sort of place that has terminals for arrivals and terminals for departures.
The first, I fear, will be disappointed—but may yet find that the Moon can be re-enchanted if they feel for it in new ways. The others will find that the Moon is a very different thing to the Earth of contract and commerce. It is rock alone, and radiation, and that is all. It is utterly inanimate. That raises practical problems. It also raises issues beyond the physical. What is natural to a place that has no life? What is proper? What is wrong? Can such a place be a country or a home? Can it be a world of experience, or must it be always just a physical environment to be coped with technologically, always other, never cousin, never self?
THERE ARE TWO THINGS WE KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT GOING TO the Moon. It is doable. And it is undoable. Once you have gone, nothing necessarily detains you there or imposes any obligation to return. For the years of Apollo, the Moon carried life, and that was remarkable. But its subsequent lifelessness goes easily unremarked. It is of little concern to most of those who look up at it or forwards to the future; it matters almost not at all to geopolitics or the world economy or climate change. No one can argue convincingly that the Return will change that. The Moon may become important. It may not.
But if it is not necessarily important, it is never not lovely. Never the same, because the skies it sits in are never quite the same. A
nd always the same, as well. Always the thing you saw when you saw it first, though that first sighting can never be remembered any more than you are likely to know for sure when you see it for the final time.
When your attention is snagged by a glimpse or a cue of the light—or, better, drawn by a human voice, standing near, exclaiming in wonder and asking you to share, as your mother did, that first certain but unremembered time—and you look on it again, how often does it disappoint? How often does its familiar strangeness not provide some small delight? How often does raising your eyes with those of another not tease out some soft sentiment? You may not look for long. But you seldom, if ever, regret paying that moment of attention to the little part of the world in the sky.
ITS PHASES
AT ITS FULLNESS IT IS A SIMPLE CIRCLE, EVERY PART OF ITS FACE lit directly by the Sun behind you. Any imperfections in its figure, such as a jitter to its edge, are due to atmospheric distortions, not its own irregularities: it is a near-perfect sphere. If it were reduced to the size of a billiard ball, the Moon would be as smooth as one.
At all other times the lit portion of its face is bound by two curves. One, the limb, is the edge of the Moon: on the inside of it, the Moon’s surface; on the outside, the stars. It is always a semicircle. The other curve, the edge of the night, the line that brings an end to one lunar day and the beginning to the next, astronomers call the terminator.
After the moment of the Moon’s fullness, this night-edge replaces the limb on the Moon’s eastern side and starts to erode the disk. The Moon is now gibbous—less than full, but more than a semicircle—and waning.
The night-edge is less sharp than the limb, because the difference between Moon and not-Moon is sharp, but the difference between day and night is more complex. Summits can still be sunlit after the lowlands around them are in night; east-facing swales can enter shadow when it is still low-lit evening a stone’s throw away. The line between lit and unlit is thus always a little incoherent.
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