‘An out-of-this-world read … brilliant and compelling. Morton is a high-octane British science journalist, and every chapter is littered with material that strikes, amazes or haunts … this is a book filled not just with a lifetime’s knowledge of its subject but with a lifetime’s suppressed excitement.’
James McConnachie, Sunday Times
Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse – with the whole world watching through their eyes.
In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind’s relationship with the Moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic. For some, it is a future on which humankind has turned its back. For others, an adventure yet to begin.
Advanced technologies, new ambitions and old dreams mean that men, women and robots now seem certain to return to the Moon. What will they learn there about the universe, the Earth-and themselves? And, this time, will they stay?
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.
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