As of the beginning of April, 24 men had flown to the Moon. Three of them had gone twice and 12 had walked on its surface. Just five of them, all in their 90s, are still alive.
Now, 28 people have seen the Moon close-up. These are the latest four: the crew of Artemis II.
I'm just old enough to remember the original Apollo missions. Any number of scientists tell stories about being shown the night sky by a parent and becoming inspired to understand what they saw up there.
I do have a memory of looking up at the Moon with my father and him telling me that people were possibly on its surface at that very moment. However, my astronomical passion must already have been well aflame because my memory is not one of sudden inspiration, but shock that a grown-up was hazy on such an important point. Were people there or not?!
While seeing the Moon with my father is not my origin story as a scientist, it may still be my origin story as a science communicator. These days, it often falls to me to be the adult who is on top of details like who is where in space at any given moment. And last week was particularly busy; at one point I got off the phone to TV1 to find a voicemail from TV3. (I didn't quite nail the double of appearing simultaneously on both bulletins – TV1 aired my interview the following day.)
The recent Artemis mission was almost flawless from start to finish, aside from a few issues with the toilet. Even so, I was braced for a degree of cynicism from the general public. For close to twenty years, the overall moon program has been hobbled by politics and inefficiency; see e.g. here or here. And the moonshot played out alongside the attacks on Iran and against the wider backdrop of America's descent into authoritarianism.
Happily, humanity mostly shared the "moon joy". A droll reply from Mission Control, in response to the astronauts enthusing about the wonder of it all was at once laconic and instantly iconic.
"Copy, Moon joy" is "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" for the Instagram age. What the phrase may lack in gravitas it gains in pure meme-ability, and was immediately all over NASA's socials. It summed up the week for me and a surprisingly large slice of the public.
All week, I chatted from people with interests far from physics, who told me they were seeing the Moon differently in the knowledge that human beings were on their way for a visit.
Five decades on from Apollo, today's astronauts are still very much made of the right stuff. Hansen (the first Canadian to visit the moon), Glover and Wiseman are all ex-fighter pilots. And like Armstrong and Aldrin before them, the two Americans have both flown in combat.
And history is a spiral. Armstrong lost a young daughter to cancer but almost never discussed it, a silence that prompted the First Man bio-pic with Ryan Gosling as Armstrong to make it a central theme of his story. So watching the four astronauts hug and pick out a crater to commemorate Wiseman's wife Carroll – taken by cancer in 2020 and leaving him a solo father – was a memorable moment of its own.
Similarly, Gil Scott-Heron's spoken-word classic, Whitey on the Moon (also featured in First Man; that movie is many things, but subtle is not one of them) lands a little differently when you learn that astronaut Victor Glover listens to it every Monday on his way to work at the Johnson Space Center.
Along with Christina Koch – the first woman to travel to the moon – the mix of voices and faces both on the Integrity spacecraft and at Mission Control is a long way from the white-shirt-skinny-black-tie world of Apollo. Notably, Koch's background includes winters in Greenland and at the South Pole; even more than her colleagues she is no stranger to isolated places.
Antarctica, beyond being a training-ground for Koch and an Earth-bound "final frontier", is also my go-to analogy when I am asked (as I often am) why it has taken 50 years to go back to the Moon. The first expeditions to the South Pole – Amundsen and Scott in 1911 and 1912 – were heroic but dangerous, in Scott's case to the point of fatality. (In a grim parallel to a multistage rocket, Amundsen systematically culled his dog team as they whittled down their sled-borne supplies, feeding the resulting meat to their packmates and their human companions.)
Those first Antarctic missions were at the limit of the contemporary technology and could not be scaled to support long-term activity at their destination. It would be another four decades before people returned to the Pole, newly enabled by aircraft and tractors.
When it comes to space exploration, today's rockets and capsules do resemble their predecessors but the technology within them is far more mature. Like the more comprehensive polar missions of the 1950s, Artemis aims to pave the way to a "permanent presence" at its destination.
Travel often leaves us with a deeper appreciation of home. One of the signature images of the Space Age is the "blue marble", shot from Apollo 17 in 1972 as it made what would be the last voyage to the lunar surface for 50 years.
Artemis's gift to the genre is "Hello World", a similarly face-on globe. But look more closely and see the differences. The Blue Marble (above) is our globe in daylight, with the Sun behind the camera illuminating the scene.
Conversely, Hello World has the Sun behind the Earth – you can see it lighting up the atmosphere on the lower right. What’s actually illuminating the Earth's surface is moonlight: this is the view from the rear window as Artemis set off on its journey, heading towards a nearly full moon. And if you look carefully is that you can also see stars in the background; the brighter light at 5 o'clock is the planet Venus, Earth's very different twin.
My professional interests all lean toward topics far beyond the reach of our everyday five senses: my work ranges across dark matter, black holes, gravitational waves, and the first moments after the Big Bang. Nonetheless, I find continual delight in watching the Moon's monthly dance and its changing shape and place in the sky. The evening crescent that follows the setting Sun below the horizon, the full Moon above our heads at midnight, a watery half-circle in the day-time, the passage of the Moon through a lunar eclipse. Even the rise and fall of the tides on the beach near my house.
Looking up, humanity tends to see the sky as a surface, a flat screen across which the Moon moves. But logic, simple geometry and a little imagination stitches these separate observations into the kinetic reality of our spherical Earth and the smaller Moon in their conjoined, unending loop around the Sun, itself located within a wider Universe. A couple of Greeks pulled off this conceptual shift (Aristarchus and Hipparchus, among others) although it took well over a dozen centuries for the rest of the world to fully catch on.
So what I love about images from space is that they instantly show us the full three dimensional geometry of our planetary home. Like this gorgeous new image of a crescent Earth peeking over the shoulder of a crescent Moon.
That's my moon joy, right there.
CODA: If you were wondering, yes, the title is a nod to the Mutton Birds. All space images via NASA. And the Antarctica analogy is via my former Columbia colleague Arlin Crotts; it's so good I've used it twice before – here and here.
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