Why Go to the Moon?

The summer of 2019 saw the 50th anniversary of what President John F. Kennedy predicted would be the “most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Collective commemoration celebrated high technological triumph that launched humans to another celestial body. Those who were alive in July 1969 shared memories of where they were when Neil Armstrong took one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind, and the current American presidential administration pledged to return Americans to the Moon by the end of a presumptive second term.
 
One attribute that went uncelebrated in the anniversary festivities features prominently in the first photographs that Neil Armstrong took on the surface of the Moon. Under the shadow of the lunar lander emblazoned with “UNITED STATES” in bold letters, is an unmarked white drawstring bag. This bag contained items that the astronauts no longer wanted in their close quarters—including excrement collection devices, empty food bags, and unneeded equipment. The first human visitors to another world left behind not only footprints. They also took out the garbage.
 
In a forum that coincided with the deposition of footprints and garbage bags alike, Roger Launius and Margaret Huettl provide a broad look at the historical context that shaped the Moon race itself, and the durable discourses of conflict and conquest that imbued the effort to reach Tranquility Base. This forum provided an opportunity to hear from an established, preeminent space historian and a historian with expertise in Indigenous history and law—the latter a much-needed perspective on the Space Race that has been virtually absent from historiography from the past half century. Even as taking out the garbage on the lunar surface replicated a startlingly mundane human practice, both speakers highlighted the ways that inequalities, politics, and legal conflicts on Earth map onto practices in space, both historical and anticipated.
 
The imagery used in both talks coincidentally, and helpfully, overlaps in places to show the durability of the cultural mystique surrounding spaceflight and the deeply problematic discourses of frontierism and colonialism that have long undergirded its expression. By grounding this mystique in both recent and deeper historical context, Huettl and Launius invite us to contemplate what might bring humans to return to our natural satellite, and what they might bring with them if they do.
 
Launius notes in his presentation that America only went to the Moon in the first place as an extension of the Cold War crisis. The Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union provided a broadly legible proxy war by which either side could demonstrate scientific and technological power without intentionally killing anyone. Building upon Huettl’s response, it would also be worth noting that some aspects of Space Age colonialism also took place in a vacuum of intent.
 
NASA intentionally exploded artificial craters into the rock of Cinder Lake in Arizona. However, space industries on both sides of the Iron Curtain also produced industrial byproducts that unintentionally fell to Earth in unexpected places. The rockets and satellites sent aloft came back in an event known as reentry, often far from the regions that initially launched them, often in regions of the Global South or Arctic. As Huettl rightly notes, Indigenous communities in America currently face the unequal effects of extractive nuclear industry that disproportionately harms Indigenous populations without benefitting those at risk. The return of space debris from orbit—especially with hazardous or nuclear materials on board—yielded similar results. By threatening the safety of communities that did not benefit from satellite technology, these unintentional acts of colonialism simultaneously erased and enrolled unwilling actors into Space Age geopolitics.[1]
 
There may not be Indigenous communities on the Moon or elsewhere in the closest reaches of the cosmos to be colonized, either with intent or by accident. Ecologists and environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s studied extraterrestrial colonization in part because it appeared to lack moral ambiguity.[2] But as Margaret Huettl points out, the legacy of colonialism may still be easily carried forward into new settings without careful acknowledgement and efforts at prevention.
                                    
America’s past of ignoring treaties and exploiting resources also reflects an unwillingness to invite all parties to the table when writing those treaties. This has historically been the case for international space governance, as well. The Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force fewer than 2 years before Apollo 11 reached the moon, prohibits conquest and empire building in space. Article I of the treaty explicitly states that “the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” Article II follows with “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
 
During the 1970s, representatives of developing and newly independent nations criticized the Outer Space Treaty as a neocolonial document, drafted by and for the benefit of industrialized space powers to preserve their hegemony in the cosmos. Huettl’s invocation of the perpetually stalled Moon Treaty reflects efforts by states subjected to this hegemony to even the playing field. The 1976 Bogotá Declaration also represented an effort by developing nations to criticize the efficacy of the Outer Space Treaty to enforce its colonial ethos in the midst of broader debates over postcolonial resource allocation taking place concurrently. A declaration of sovereignty over the geostationary orbit, Bogotá was also all but ignored by those in power. Neither Bogotá nor the Moon Treaty yielded any measurable change in the geopolitical hierarchies of the Space Age.
 
Perhaps, as Huettl suggests, shifting away from this long history of exclusion to bring to the table more voices and perspectives beyond those privileged within Western hegemony may help sway the easy acceptance of erasing a region or planet’s natural history. We need look no further than geophysical change on our own planet to see both the material dimensions of this exclusion and the critical analysis of these changes. Moderator Andrew Johnston notes that human beings have been changing the environment “for better or for worse.” As Gabrielle Hecht has noted, however, this kind of claim homogenizes human experiences and renders humanity as a single, monolithic geophysical force.[3] Even as not all of humanity was included in the first drive to the moon, not all of humanity participates equally in the Anthropocene.
 
Johnston’s concluding question to the forum elicited responses from both panelists that reflect American attitudes about the space program from the very beginning: Either yes, we should go, because it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the universe; or no, we shouldn’t go, because we have enough to fix back home on Earth first. The latter response echoes the beliefs of anti-war activists, environmentalists, and civil rights activists during Apollo. Indeed, the day before the launch of Apollo 11, the Poor People's Campaign held a protest at Cape Canaveral to draw attention to national priorities that favored an outsize financial layout to fly astronauts to the moon while poor Black families starved.[4]
 
This strikes at the core of another necessary part of any discussion of colonization, extraterrestrial or earthbound. Recalling again Launius’s reminder that the Cold War conflict produced the stratus from which the Moon landing took form also requires acknowledging the centrality of clashing between economic world views. The space race bore the conflict over whether capitalism or communism build better spaceships, explicit in public pronouncements by both sides. Capitalism won the predetermined prize, just as it drove earlier colonial efforts at conquest, extraction, and exploitation.
 
As the presence of private industry and hyper-wealthy individuals as power players in the space industry expands, many of these individuals eye other planets as potential sites for the perpetuation of the human species. The question of whether or not humanity can become multi-planet without exploitation and exclusion requires consideration of what parts of humanity get preserved into that future—including the extractive capitalism that has so drastically reshaped Earth that the most wealthy now seek new homes elsewhere in the cosmos.
 
In April 2019 the first privately funded mission to reach the moon crash landed on the lunar surface. The impact of the Beresheet spacecraft spread human DNA samples, microscopic tardigrades, and fragments of a data storage medium across the magnificently desolate landscape. These components represented the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation’s stated dedication to building a “backup of planet Earth.”
 
Who gets to choose what parts of Earth gets preserved in these backups? Which people, cultures, species, aesthetics, legal regimes, waste practices? The question of whether we should go back to the Moon at all continues to be perpetually strung between realism and optimistic futurism. Yet, as the historians in this forum have made clear, the likelihood that those with the power and resources to reach other worlds, should they decide to go, would likely do so through benefit of the same power structures that buoyed their colonial forebears forward to worlds that were never theirs to claim.

[1] Lisa Ruth Rand, “Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth Orbit,” Environmental History 24, no. 1 (January 2019): 78–103.

[2] Lisa Ruth Rand, “Colonizing Mars: Practicing Other Worlds on Earth,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, November 2017, http://origins.osu.edu/article/colonizing-mars-practicing-other-worlds-e....

[3] Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (February 22, 2018): 109–41.

[4] Neil M. Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017).

The summer of 2019 saw the 50th anniversary of what President John F. Kennedy predicted would be the “most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.” Collective commemoration celebrated high technological triumph that launched humans to another celestial body. Those who were alive in July 1969 shared memories of where they were when Neil Armstrong took one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind, and the current American presidential administration pledged to return Americans to the Moon by the end of a presumptive second term.
 

From its onset the space age has conflated three themes - exploration, science, and colonization.  But two big divides run through them all.  One is between the inhabitable parts of Earth and the uninhabitable places exploration is taking us; the other, between humans and robots. 
 
Exploration, especially far-distant, can be done well by robots; a mission like Voyager’s across the solar system is an interplanetary version of Magellan’s circumnavigation.  Science, too, needs only instruments; the Hubble Telescope routinely discovered not just data but new worlds.  Colonization, however, requires a human presence. 
 
Each theme has its tradition, apart from the others.  Sometimes they intertwine, sometimes they diverge.  Exploration evolved out of the quest, to which the Great Voyages helped update and institutionalize the narrative in ways that allowed it to persist across centuries.  Modern science didn’t exist until a century after the Great Voyages.  Only in the late 18th century did naturalists replace missionaries, and data rival bullion as a goal of exploring.
 
Likewise, conquest and colonization didn’t need new worlds: they had happened regularly in known worlds.  The Normans took England, and England took Ireland, well before Britain took large chunks of North America.  The Great Voyages of discovery in the Renaissance wanted trade and searched for new ways to get it; colonization was typically discouraged because its costs were high. Outposts in foreign lands were overwhelmingly trading factories.  Where conquest occurred, Iberians ruled over natives rather than attempt a demographic takeover.  The British, too, were masters of indirect governance; wealth – trade, not land - was the goal.  Not until the late 18th, mostly 19th century, did colonization in settler societies like America and Australia mean mass emigration and land seizure from indigenes. 
 
The core drama of discovery – encounter - lay less with new lands than with new peoples.  Explorers might or might not see themselves as the vanguard of expansion; it was enough to unveil the Unknown.  Naturalists could claim they were the neutral agents of a transcendent Reason.  Both relied on indigenes as guides, collectors, and allies, and interpreters were often the critical catalyst to success.  Discovery was typically a translation of lore from one people to another.
 
But when commerce segued into colonization, contact entered a moral universe galvanized by how people should relate to one another.  The Cross, and later science, helped early explorers sanction what followed.  But contact was inevitably tainted.  In extreme forms it led to the dissolution of the discovered and the unraveling of the discoverers, to which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness bears witness.  The prevailing saga was, like so many creation stories, a tragedy.
 
A new age of discovery launched in the post-World War II era to explore Antarctica, the deep oceans, and interplanetary space.  These were areas without indigenous peoples and for that matter, except in odd niches, without life.  They were uninhabitable without extensive prostheses and artificial dwellings.  The most effective explorers were robots; many places were only accessible to robots. 
 
The old moral qualms about contact vanished: there were no other people to interact with.  It seemed possible to enjoy the blessings of exploration, science, and colonization without the ethical banes of contact.  Paradoxically, the loss of moral unease also led to a loss of moral drama and public support.  Hollywood could populate space with suitable aliens; the solar system could not. 
 
The political, legal, and moral concerns between the discoverers and the discovered were only half the equation.  The other half were the relations that discovery disrupted among the discoverers.  What kept the West’s expansionist pot boiling were rivalries within Europe, which exploration and conquest projected outward.  From the onset treaties were crafted to contain those conflicts and to keep them on the periphery.  Today, treaties exist to forestall national claims for the three realms that discovery has unveiled. 
 
The current age, moreover, has been one of decolonization.  Even settler societies like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are renegotiating their political constitutions to accommodate the surviving indigenous peoples.  Whatever the fantasies or astro-utopian ambitions of would-be colonizers, there is likely little cultural taste for a space-bound Cecil Rhodes or Francisco Pizarro. 
 
The prospects for colonization in any meaningful sense are scant; even after more than a century no permanent society exists on Antarctica, only bases maintained for science and national prestige, with an annual churn of occupants.  It is hard to imagine much more on the Moon or Mars.  The old ethical and political qualms about contact don’t exist. 
 
But just as expansion was a response to internal competition among the nations of the West, so the discourse about space colonization will kindle further debate the internal relations left behind from those centuries of expansion.  Future ‘colonization’ may rekindle arguments about previous episodes.  The colonial past will haunt the future.  While the old model of colonization may be meaningless, the memories it has left survive. 
 
We can go into space as explorers and scientists, and within limits, as traders for information.  American exceptionalism is just that - exceptional.  There is no reason to project colonial schemes across the solar system.

From its onset the space age has conflated three themes - exploration, science, and colonization.  But two big divides run through them all.  One is between the inhabitable parts of Earth and the uninhabitable places exploration is taking us; the other, between humans and robots.