The Moon: A History for the Future

"In 2018, when I recalled that the Apollo mission’s finest moment — first footfall on the lunar surface — was about to turn 50, I braced for a deluge. More than 20 commemorations of the event duly arrived. But in The Moon , Morton takes a different tack. He opts for a holistic portrait of our closest celestial body, while keeping the landing and future possibilities in view. This is a scrupulously researched, formally innovative delight. The writing ever edges into the poetic; it’s just a constant pleasure. At a time when many are eyeing up that dusty expanse again for what Morton calls the “Return”, this book steps back, deftly explaining the science on our satellite and its cultural niche in the charged space between the once and future Moons. Morton (a science writer now at the Economist , and former Nature editor) is tugged by the Moon’s beauty as it shifts through its phases, scimitar to pearl. But in the next breath he reminds us that lunar science has long been on the wane. Many astronomers dismiss the Moon as a luminous impediment to stargazing. And its “physical mysteries are few” compared to Earth’s, he notes. Yet he opens the door to re-enchantment. His entwined cultural and scientific history of how we came to understand the Moon is beguiling. For centuries, luminaries from artist Jan van Eyck to Enlightenment scientist Robert Hooke and Victorian industrialist James Nasmyth attempted to ‘read’ the lunar face. Leonardo identified the ‘ashen light’ reflected by Earth on the Moon. With NASA’s lunar-mapping missions and the Apollo landings, the furrowed surface came into proper focus, as did the satellite’s origins in an impact between proto-Earth and a body called Theia. The Moon formed from that “fiery orbital aftermath”. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As for the landings themselves, Morton recreates the thrill of the moment by juxtaposing transcribed audio with analysis. And his survey of new plans for the Moon, from robotic payloads and extractive industries to colonies, is compelling. The list of humans who’ve been there and back (currently, 24) could swell. We examine the hardware, the investments, the involvement of commercial interests. We learn of the wee spacecraft called cubesats, such as NASA’s BOLAS (Bi-sat Observations of Lunar Atmosphere above Swirls), which suggest a way of studying processes on the lunar surface. We’re invited to ponder the possibility of a lunar ‘hab’ for humans in cathedral-sized lava tubes. Throughout, Morton braids the stories — parodic or science-fictional — that have spurred us towards that enigmatic surface. Stories that, clamped to science, also enable us to envision the future Moon. It’s highly realistic, in the sense that he marshals hard science and cogent conjecture to inform his discussions of potential lunar ventures decades or centuries hence. You feel on firm ground, wandering among moonbases for mining volatiles and baked-regolith-brick dwellings. But we know it’s not all just hardware and infrastructure. A human on the Moon is still a human, restless, flawed, carrying a ton of baggage. How do we imagine ourselves into that future? Here the speculative thinking of novelists comes into its own. Robert Heinlein’s 1966 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , for instance, envisions the satellite as a penal colony and hotbed for revolt. Morton is not, of course, seeking prophecies about actual developments, but insights into hypothetical life on the “Unworld”. We pack our Earth-born systems of economics and governance — and our demonstrable failings — into the luggage. As he puts it, “space is an extension of the Earth, not an exemption from its strictures. An antagonistic world will create a Moon to match.” In my view, we see the shadow of that in purely commercial conceptualisations of the Moon – lunar orbit as an adventure for the super-rich, industrial dreams of platinum mining. Inanimate rock it may be, but the Moon is ultimately more than a new colonial base for the same old inequities. Or so I would like to think."