A few years ago I learned that humans were going to return to the moon, they wouldn’t land, that would come later if all things went well, but this mission, Artemis II, would take four people around the moon, the first people who would be anywhere near the moon in over fifty years. The last moon landing happened in 1972. And that was the first and last time a scientist would visit the moon, geologist Harrison Schmitt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt
Weirdly enough Schmitt is a climate change denier, which almost makes me wonder would he believe the moon landings hadn’t happened if he hadn’t been there himself? Anyway, it feels like the missions to the moon ended way to soon. The first moon mission, with a scientist, should have been the first of many. But, it ended there and then. The context of these missions has to be understood. It was the Cold War. The U.S showed up the Ruskies in 1969 by getting to the moon first, so in a way, those later moon missions were surplus to that requirement, and we’re lucky we got them at all.
All of the Apollo missions were very white, very male, and very American. So only a very exclusive club has so far been to the moon. But Artemis II is different. Victor Glover (incidentally, coolest name ever, you’re pretty much obligated to be an astronaut if that’s your name!), will be the first black man to travel to the vicinity of the moon. Christina Koch will be the first woman to do so. And Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian, will be the first non-American to do so.
So, I should be more enthusiastic about this. Humanity is going back to the moon, and it’s not just a white American boy’s club anymore! We can pick up after the 1972 mission, and do more science, and learn more about our nearest neighbour. This should all be great, right?
The truth is, I am keeping up with the moon mission, but that’s just it, I’m just, keeping up with it. If you had told me, 3 years ago, that I wouldn’t be absolutely glued to the screen as I watched humanity’s return to the moon, I would have been very, very surprised. I got up at like, five o clock in the morning for the New Horizons Pluto flyby. I’ve written the first half of two songs for the Juice and Europa Clipper missions (the songs will be finished, many years from now, when they reach their destination):
https://soundcloud.com/user-429211267/jupiter-icy-moons-explorer-i-the-journey-begins
I have two telescopes, and you’d be amazed what detail on the moon you can see just from your backyard. Seeing a crater, one half of it bathed in light, the other half shrouded in darkness, will take your breathe away. I’m a space nerd. And yes, there is a part of me that is delighted that humanity is going back to the moon, but another part of me that wishes humans would just leave that big, beautiful ball of grey rock alone, let it fly around our home in peace, leave it alone! So what’s going on?
Ever Heard Whitey On The Moon?
Gil Scott Heron was an American jazz poet, often called, and quite rightly, the godfather of hip hop. Spoken word music about social justice over a beat? That sounds like it could be an earlier version of Public Enemy or KRS-One to me! And in this piece, called Whitey On The Moon, he gave his thoughts on the moon landing:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
Gil Scott Heron declares that he couldn’t give a fuck about the moon, with his community, poor to begin with, and threatened with further poverty each and every time they face a medical emergency, why ever should he care about the fact that three white guys got to go to the moon? In fact, during the 2019 celebrations for the 50th anniversary for the moon landing, despite being in a celebratory mood myself, I actually listened to Whitey On The Moon a lot. Yes, it was an amazing achievement. In 1969, humanity finally decided to land on that orb that has lived in our sky since long before humanity even evolved. It was a fantastic technological achievement, and it took a level of courage and discipline that most of us can barely even imagine to finally set foot on another world. But, to people of colour, to poor people, to the Americans being sent to die in a senseless war in Vietnam, to the Vietnamese killed in that senseless war, to the people all over the world every day who worried that either the United States or the Soviet Union would finally make the decision to drop the atomic bomb, why should it have mattered even one iota that humanity had finally landed on the moon? The world was in a fairly disordered, ugly, and terrifying place back then. And the same can be said for the state of the world now.
The Moon In The Context Of 2026
If humanity was going back to the moon, any time from 1990 (the youngest possible time I could have remembered it in any detail), to 2023, there would, I think, be more wall to wall celebration from me, rather than just this ambivalence. How have things changed since 2023?
Of course, we can debate how much things changed, and how much the last few years just exposed the rottenness that was always there. 2023 began the first ever livestreamed genocide. The people of Gaza begged the people in power to do something, anything, to stop the mass slaughter that they were experiencing, and the people in power, didn’t care. Now, with Gaza reduced to rubble, the genocide has disappeared pretty much entirely from mainstream media, and now the main focus is, one of the Kardashians got a new hat, or something. Then, a maniac called Trump got back into the White House. Biden was a monster who cared nothing for the lives of the people of Gaza, same with Harris, but, the idea that this guy would be given another chance in the White House, was absolutely horrifying. Then ICE murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alex_Pretti
And just when everyone was processing all of this, we had the latest Epstein revelations. I’ve written about that here:
It seems like there needs to be a new term for the amount of overload that’s occurring in 2026, injustice overload? The reason I’ve barely written about ICE is because it’s just so difficult to find the time, and to enter the mental headspace, for writing about everything that is going on.
So, what’s going on on Earth as these four astronauts head to the moon? America and Israel are bombing Iran is what’s happening. There’s almost a dark irony in the fact that there is fuel to send a spacecraft to the moon but many people around the world are worried about how they’re going to put fuel in their own cars. These worries have already hit my home country of Ireland:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0405/1566819-energy-crisis-world/
I know people who are driving less. I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t need to drive, everything I need is within cycling distance, but what about those who need to drive due to a disability? What about those who need to drive because they live in a rural area? And despite being grateful that I’m lucky, comparatively speaking, I’m not naive enough to believe that people in my situation will be protected forever. Food transport requires fuel. Medical supplies transport requires fuel. On a personal level I don’t need to drive, but I’m not short sighted enough to realize that I’m dependent on those who do drive. And they need fuel, to do their jobs. And because Israel and the United States decided to attack Iran, those drivers, essential to our economy, may not get the fuel they need. I stress that I’m one of the lucky ones in this situation. And even I’m worried. I dread to think what it must be like for others.
So that’s 2026. A world on the edge. A dystopia. But hey, we’re going back to the moon!
Should We Just, Leave The Moon Alone?
You know, from 1972, until this year, we just, left the moon alone. We sent probes there, but in terms of a manned presence on the moon, we just, left the moon alone. That is an option.
I’m not saying there couldn’t be a positive presence on the moon. If there was a few research bases there, where scientists could stay on the moon a long time to really learn about the geology, climate and formation of the moon, that would be a wonderful thing. Do you know that the moon was formed when a giant planet called Theia collided with Earth, and the bits of Earth rock that were thrown into space became the moon?
That’s just what we know now, with just a handful of manned trips to the moon. Just think what we could learn over time!
But do you know, and I don’t know will this come as a surprise or not, what I’m more excited for? The Dragonfly mission. This is a Nasa mission that will launch in a few years, if all goes well, to place an octocopter on Saturn’s moon Titan. (An octocopter is basically a quadcopter, but cooler!) Imagine that, an actual aircraft, flying around Titan! Titan was always one of my favourite places in the solar system, after Earth of course. It’s got methane lakes, methane rivers and it rains methane there! I’m honestly more excited for Titan exploration than for Moon exploration, don’t get me wrong, I love the moon. But there’s been six manned trips to the moon, a bunch of landers, hell, you can even see the moon fairly well with a ground based telescope. But only one craft has landed on Titan, the Huygens probe, standing guard over Titan is our only messenger from the human race to that alien world. There’s something kind of romantic about this, a lonely sentinel from Earth watching over Titan. But still, Titan is such a wonderful, amazing, and unexplored place that it’d be nice to see some more craft exploring it!
There’s another reason I’m more enthusiastic for exploring the other planets and moons in our solar system, than I am for exploring our moon. These places are, near enough that we can explore them, but, to put this bluntly, still too far away for us to fuck up.
Take Mars, a, relatively speaking, somewhat near planet, at least in comparison to Jupiter and Saturn. We are able to send robotic spaceprobes to Mars, and a few years ago, we had a very proud moment in the history of aviation, with Ingenuity being the first aircraft to fly on another world, and I was one of many people saddened when Ingenuity broke down, never to fly again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
So, because of technological limitations, we can’t land people on any place in our solar system besides the moon. We can send probes there, that’s it. We can explore Mars, Titan, Europa, and all the others, but we can’t do anything else to them, beyond exploration. In a word, we can’t fuck them up.
The moon is different. As already mentioned, we could set up some research stations there, like with Antarctica, and I would say I’d broadly be in favour of that. Though we could still ask the question should we focus more on for example, the moons of Uranus or Neptune, none of which have had a craft ever land on them.
A possibly relevant case study for how, frankly, polluting humans can be, is Mount Everest. Nobody reached the top of Everest until the year 1953. Now, in a human lifetime, the place is already a garbage dump:
So, given how bad humans are at, not polluting stuff, perhaps an argument could be made for just sending unmanned probes to the moon for the foreseeable future, until we sort out the fact that, as a species we keep, well, breaking stuff?
I was never really a big believer in the idea that we should solve Earth’s problems before we increase our human presence in space. Not because I wouldn’t hesitate to press a button that would end poverty but in doing so would end space exploration, because I wouldn’t. But rather it’s the fact that, poverty, genocide, racism, colonialism, all of these evils existed long before space exploration happened. So I don’t see an argument that eliminating space exploration would somehow help us create a more fair and just world. At the same time, I’m a bit skeptical of what’s called “The Overview Effect”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
I think it’s very difficult to prove the idea that visiting space will make us better stewards of the Earth. As already mentioned, Harrison Schmitt went to the moon, and he’s a climate change denier. Now, you could say, that’s just one example,but only 12 people have gone to the moon. Sending people to the moon is expensive, dangerous, and sending rockets into space is not good for our environment. What if we send a bunch more people into space, and to the moon, and then with more research we learn that the overview effect is a myth?
The Trump Administration Going To The Moon Sounds Like A Bad Joke
The Artemis program was formally started in 2017:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program
This means, with just a brief four year interlude of Biden leadership, this has been, to a very large extent, a Trump project. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s micromanaging the whole thing (he’d probably have complaints about Victor Glover and Christina Koch being part of the missions as an example of DEI), but nevertheless, much of the Artemis program happened under Trump’s watch. Now, I’ve never met a U.S president I liked, but I don’t know has any president been more unconcerned with the general stability of the world than Trump. Don’t get me wrong, the previous U.S presidents may well have cared about that purely for their own selfish reasons, but at least they cared, for some reason, Trump doesn’t.
A man who assisted in the genocide in Gaza, who has made ICE a more bloodthirsty organization, who is mentioned more than 1,000 times in the Epstein files:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/31/politics/new-documents-trump-epstein
and is now engaging in a horrific war with Iran, seemingly to distract from the Epstein files and because Nehenyahu told him to do it, at least that seems like part of the reason, and we’re supposed to believe he has benevolent motives for moon colonization? There’s a part of me that’s saying, at least if he’s destroying the moon he’s destroying a place where nobody lives, so nobody will suffer. But, there’s also a part of me that is happy that, while humanity is trying to find a way out of this dystopia that is the year 2026, we’re leaving the rest of the solar system alone. Right now, the rot is only on Earth, under Trump, that rot could spread to the moon. Could the moon soon be just like Everest, a dump?
Maybe that’s a trivial concern, after all, polluting the moon is polluting a land where nobody lives, so I can understand how it mightn’t seem like that big a deal. However, it won’t just affect the moon. More spaceflight, means more damage to the climate. During a climate catastrophe. We’re already seeing an increase in “space tourism”, with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. I can imagine over the next few decades a thriving industry of vapid celebrities taking selfies on the moon, as the moon is transformed from a pristine landscape, mostly untouched by human pollution, to a garbage dump, the rockets launching from Earth further worsening our climate catastrophe.
It mightn’t seem like it, but I really am happy for Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen, the four astronauts who are currently in the middle of an amazing adventure. They get to experience something truly remarkable and truly beautiful, and I’m glad that their years of very extensive and difficult training has paid off, and they get to see up close, an amazing world that our ancestors have gazed up at for millennia. I’m happy that they get to experience such wonder. I just wish humanity was going back to the moon under better, less dystopian, circumstances.
Ponderings Of An Autist 