The Moon

by Oliver Morton

  Ten years before John F. Kennedy’s election campaign promised America “New Frontiers” Heinlein’s Harriman offered inspiration

  —Tell them that this means new frontiers…

  in the form of America’s settler story of new lands and new horizons. The vision became part of Apollo, and its appeal persists to this day, felt intensely by a few, for most just one part of a more generalized exceptionalist belief that there is more to America than the mundane, some promise which inspires. The sentiment was strong enough to save America’s human-spaceflight programme from the job-done post-Apollo cancellation that could easily have been its fate. In 1971 Cap Weinberger, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget, recommended in a memo that instead of cancelling the programme entirely, the nation should build the much-more-modest-than-Apollo space shuttle.

  “America”, Weinberger asserted, “should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like.”

  “I agree with Cap”, President Richard Nixon wrote in pen at the top of the memo. Americans would continue to fly into space as others did not and would continue to see that as a bit of what made them special.

  As had been the case with Apollo, the space shuttle was also sold as

  —… a shot in the arm for prosperity.

  a path to profitable new technologies. In this respect it did not pay off. The sort of technology the world was interested in

  —Fast transportation will pay; it always has.

  was changing: the ever-faster, ever-farther era that burst on it with the steam locomotives that rushed past the Bridgewater Foundry, and which heard its apotheosis in the thunder of the F-1 engine, was over. The taste for speed’s genuinely modern pleasure was sated. No humans have ever gone faster than the crew of Apollo 13.

  The shuttle’s military applications were also part of its attraction. But they were limited to putting spy satellites into low Earth orbit. It wasn’t as if there was anything farther out in space that people could any longer be scared

  —For years I’ve had a recurrent nightmare of waking up and seeing headlines that the Russians had landed on the Moon and declared the Lunar Soviet.

  into racing to defend. Submarines offered a much better way of keeping nuclear weapons safe from sneak attacks than squirreling them away on the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty negotiated at the United Nations in 1967 was able to enshrine the idea that space must only be put to peaceful uses largely because the two powers with the capacity to make non-peaceful use of it could see no real mileage in doing so.

  Despite the impact the first broadcasts from the Moon had on adults and children around the world, it was never going to be a useful communications relay, because it could broadcast to any given spot

  —Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interfere with a telecast from the Moon and that boards of censorship on Earth won’t have jurisdiction?

  on the spinning Earth for fewer than 12 hours in every 24. As Arthur C. Clarke had pointed out, satellites in geostationary orbits were far superior. Witness the fact that, without them, NASA would not have been able to relay the messages picked up from its receivers all around the world back to Houston—and Walter Cronkite—regardless of where the Moon was in the sky.

  The Moon’s minerals

  —A thousand acres at a dollar an acre. Who’s going to turn down a bargain like that? Particularly after the rumour gets around that the Moon is believed to be loaded with uranium?

  —Is it?

  —How should I know?

  were, in the 1970s, of academic interest only. The Apollo samples held no remotely attractive ores. The diamonds with which science fiction had been littering its surface since the 1930s

  —Your geologists all agree that diamonds result from volcanic action. What do you think we will find there?

  He dropped a large photograph of the Moon on the Dutchman’s desk. The diamond merchant looked impassively at the pictured planet, pockmarked by a thousand giant craters.

  were nowhere to be seen. The pressures needed to form diamonds are found only in the deepest portions of the Moon’s mantle, a zone from which there is probably no escape to the surface.

  There are other ways a venture could raise money. But advertising,

  —A few days ago a man came to me—you’ll pardon me if I don’t mention names? You can figure it out. Anyhow, this man represented a client who wanted to buy the advertising concession for the Moon. He knew we weren’t sure of success; but he said his client would take the risk.

  product placement,

  When the Moon-ship Pioneer climbs skyward on a ladder of flame, twenty-seven essential devices in her “innards” will be powered by especially-engineered DELTA batteries…

  raiding children’s piggy banks

  —I want an angle to squeeze dimes out of the school kids, too. Forty million school kids at a dime a head is $4,000,000.00—we can use that.

  —Why stop at a dime?…

  and philanthropy

  —It’s never milked dry, as long as there are rich men around who would rather make gifts than pay taxes.

  were not going to do it. Nor, for that matter, would philately.

  —George, you collect stamps, don’t you?

  —Yes.

  —How much would a cover be worth which had been to the Moon and been cancelled there?

  —Huh? But you couldn’t, you know.

  —I think we could get our Moon-ship declared a legal post office sub-station without too much trouble.

  The crew of Apollo 15 actually tried this one, taking some stamped commemorative covers that had somehow not made it onto NASA’s official manifest down to the Moon’s surface and later providing them to German collectors. The rewards were not that great. And none of the three men ever travelled into space with NASA again.

  In the end, though, whatever reasons and inducements Harriman could offer his friends and marks for going to the Moon were not the real point. As Harriman, and Heinlein, knew from the first words of their story

  —You’ve got to be a believer!

  You. Not everyone. You. The vision of an expansion beyond the Earth and into the future sunrise

  To the east the ship towered skyward, her slender pyramid sharp black against the full Moon.

  is a curiously personal thing. Those with the vision believe in its universal relevance; they are mostly, I think, sincere in what they say about human destiny and the like. But they also believe this universal good can and will act specifically through them, and people like them. In “The Challenge of the Spaceship”, a paper that he delivered to his colleagues in the British Interplanetary Society in 1946, Arthur C. Clarke talks of explorers, musicians and mathematicians as people who do what they do not for any practical or impractical reason, but because they must:

  [And] so, if we will be honest with ourselves, it is with us. Any “reasons” we may give for wanting to cross space are afterthoughts, excuses tacked on because we feel that we ought, rationally, to have them. They are true, but superfluous—except for the practical value they may have when we try to enlist the support of those who may not share our particular enthusiasm for astronautics yet can appreciate the benefits it may bring, and the repercussions these will have upon the causes for which they, too, feel deeply.

  The orphans of Apollo mixed Clarke’s particular enthusiasm and Harriman’s compulsion to believe with the frustration of being not tantalized by a fancy of the future but robbed of a fact of the present. They thought that the world wanted the Moon and what it stood for. In fact, as Clarke saw would be the case, powerful men had wanted it instead for the repercussions they believed it could have on other causes they felt more dearly.

  NOW, AFTER ALMOST 50 YEARS OF HURT, BUT NEVER STOPPING dreaming, the orphans’ wait is almost over. A flotilla of robotic payloads will be beaching up on the lunar surface in the next five or so years, some from established spacefaring po
wers like China, India and America, some from newcomers, such as Israel and Canada. Some will be paid for as business investments, and some as philanthropy, instead of by governments, and some by money from all those sources. Some will get there under their own steam; some will pay for a ride on another company’s, or country’s, bus. Some will be given their rides for free.

  In part this is because the technology of robotic spaceflight has got better, and cheaper, and the means of private individuals interested in such technologies have grown larger. In part it is because new questions arose in the 1990s—specifically, the nature of those volatiles at the Moon’s poles—that people want to answer both for scientific reasons and for practical ones. And in part it is because it looks increasingly likely that humans will return to the Moon reasonably soon, not simply to visit but perhaps to stay; there is talk of moonbases again, even of “Moon villages.” The robots are their scouts—some of them in a practical sense, all of them in a symbolic one.

  As well as new technology and the new sources of money, though, there are also new reasons. One is descended from the Cold War that launched the Space Race and the lunar landscapes it revealed: the issue which has come to be known as “existential threat”.

  One of the reasons people in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th were reluctant to believe that the Moon’s craters were formed by impacts was the disturbing corollary that if the Moon was thus battered, the Earth must be, too. Understanding of the distinctive impact signatures that Shoemaker first documented at Meteor Crater proved this correct. In 1961 he and his colleagues showed the Nördlinger Ries in Germany to be a far larger impact structure, a crater 24km across. A couple of years later the impact origin of the Carswell structure in Saskatchewan was recognised. This one was 40km across—almost half the size of Tycho, and roughly the same age.

  Geologists, the uniformitarian custodians of Earth’s history, at first saw these past impacts as irrelevant to their greater concerns and inimical to their distrust of the catastrophic. Some science fiction writers paid more attention. In “Lucifer’s Hammer” (1977), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle provided a physically plausible and politically troubling account of a comet impact and its apocalyptic effects. In 1980 Walter Alvarez, a palaeontologist at the University of California; Luis Alvarez, a physicist and his father; and Frank Asaro and Helen Vaughn Michel, two chemists, revealed evidence that a large impact had brought about the end of the Cretaceous Period, and with it the extinction of the dinosaurs, by scouring North America with tsunamis and debris and throwing enough dust into the atmosphere to deprive the whole planet of sunlight. “‘Lucifer’s Hammer’ killed the dinosaurs”, Luis Alvarez told one of his audiences.

  By this point Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, as well as a few other researchers, were using telescopes to scan the skies for Earth-threatening asteroids. Worrying about such things was still seen as absurd in policy circles, but not among space enthusiasts, for whom it underlined two previously marginal reasons for going into space.

  One was to find any asteroids or comets that threatened Earth and deflect them. Rick Delanty, an Apollo-era astronaut in “Lucifer’s Hammer”, is clear and anguished on the question: “In ten more years we’d have been able to push the damned thing out of our way!” At science fiction conventions people began to be seen in T-shirts that said, “The dinosaurs died out because they didn’t have a space program”—a line attributed to Mr Niven, along with the rider “And if we become extinct because we didn’t have a space program it will serve us right!”

  The other reason was a deeper, broader one, built on an urge not to deflect but to flee. The insight that Kevin Zahnle and Norm Sleep had into life during the heavy bombardment—that when the shit goes down, it is better to be thrown off the world on a meteorite than to boil in situ with the oceans—could apply to humans in the Anthropocene just as it applied to microbes in the Hadean. Being off the planet provides a refuge when things on the planet can’t be survived. As Clarke put it in his first published novel, “Prelude to Space” (1948): “The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”*

  The thought is another of the ways that space travel and superweapons form a science-fictional double act, with the rockets which might prosecute a nuclear war reinterpreted as the means of escaping it. As “Prelude to Space” has it, “Atomic power makes interplanetary travel not just possible but imperative”. In Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” (1950), American colonists look back on their Earth engulfed in nuclear flame, the first characters in science fiction, I believe, so to do.

  Side-stepping war this way might work—to the extent that, survivor guilt being what it is, it could work at all—if the colonists are overwhelmingly from one side of the conflict. But if the people of Mars, or the Moon, are as divided as the governments of Earth, the war would seem likely to spread. In Michael Swanwick’s “Griffin’s Egg” (1992), the workers on the Moon’s surface who watch in shock as pinpoint-clear nuclear blasts pepper the face of the Earth above them return to a moonbase driven mad by neurotoxic sabotage. In Ben Bova’s “Millennium” (1976), the inhabitants of adjacent American and Soviet moonbases built during a long-gone era of détente watch their home world move inexorably towards war. Chet Kinsman, the American base commander, suggests to his counterpart Piotr Leonov that they unite, declare independence and sit out the war as only those 380,000km away have the privilege to do.

  “Do you seriously believe,” [Leonov] asked slowly, without turning back to face Kinsman, “that any of us could watch our homelands being destroyed without going mad? Do you honestly believe that their war will not destroy us, too?”

  Forcing his voice to stay calm as he walked to stand beside his friend, Kinsman answered, “We could get through it without fighting. If we tried.”

  The Russian’s voice was infinitely sad. “No, old friend. I might trust you and you might trust me, but to expect nearly a thousand Russians and Americans to trust each other while they watch their families being killed—never.”

  Kinsman wanted to scream. Instead, he heard himself whisper, “But Pete, what can we do?”

  “Nothing. The world will end. The millennium is rushing upon us.”*

  Sitting out a nuclear war on the Moon had a ghastly fascination. As a rationale for going to the Moon in the first place, though, it was terrible. Surely better to put one’s resources into stopping the war than into building a sad, squalid bunker in the sky?

  Inhuman threats to life on Earth, such as impacts on a dinosaur-extinguishing scale, seemed to offer a less suspect motive for a planetary exit strategy. Although war might always be better averted than fled from, a natural precariousness to life on Earth really might justify expansion. Insights from the Moon into the Earth’s battered history reinvigorated this idea, but it was not new. Oriana Fallaci’s book about astronauts and Apollo, “If the Sun Dies” (1965), is framed as a conversation between Fallaci and her father, who sees all that life needs, and all that life is—air, water, growth—as being always already available on Earth: why then venture into asphyxiating, lifeless space? Fallaci replies by quoting Ray Bradbury—not in his fictional mode, but in his prophetic one:

  For the same reason that makes us bring children into the world.

  Because we’re afraid of death and darkness, and because we want to see our image reflected and perpetuated to immortality.

  We don’t want to die, but death is there, and because it’s there we give birth to children who’ll give birth to other children and so on to infinity.

  And this way we are handed down to eternity.

  Don’t let us forget this: that the Earth can die, explode, the Sun can go out, will go out.

  And if the Sun dies, if the Earth dies, if our race dies, then so will everything die that we have done up to that moment.

  Homer will die, Michelangelo will die, Galileo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Einstein will die, all those will die who now are not dead because
we are alive, we are thinking of them, we are carrying them within us.

  And then every single thing, every memory, will hurtle down into the void with us.

  So let us save them, let us save ourselves. Let us prepare ourselves to escape, to continue life and rebuild our cities on other planets: we shall not long be of this Earth!

  The words resonate and inspire: they sound like an evocation of the loftiness of the human spirit. At the same time they feel as desperate as they do heroic. And they have more in common with some of the intellectual criticism of the Apollo programme Fallaci celebrates than either side would have accepted at the time.

  That criticism, too, was motivated by a fear of the end of the world. It just put the end in the present rather than in the future, seeing it as a piece with the thinking that had brought about the space programme in the first place. As Hannah Arendt argues in “The Human Condition” (1958), to wish to go beyond the Earth was to break something fundamental about what it is to be a human in the world. Influenced, as a student and enemy of totalitarianism would have to be, by the fact that Sputnik had been a Soviet achievement, Arendt, like Fallaci’s father, saw a form of annihilation in such attempts at technological transcendence. The human condition was to be rooted in a world of life and death, to be born and nourished by it, to die in it. Space travel was thus in itself the end of the world. Martin Heidegger, her by then long-repudiated teacher and lover, expressed similar views in a 1966 interview published after his death a decade later:

  Technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them. I do not know whether you were frightened, but I at any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the earth. We don’t need any atom bomb. The uprooting of man has already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which man lives.*