Paleolithic statues of Venus look like pregnant or obese women, but also resemble overlays of full moons. Jules Cashford explains to us in his fascinating cultural history The Moon. Symbol of transformation (Atalanta) that lunar myths have since been linked to all aspects of life on Earth: the cycles of time, the water of life and tides, the feminine and the masculine and the mutable, the Sun and darkness, destiny, fertility and death. It is possible that the first prehistoric records, the first proto-writings, were of the phases of the Moon, as an attempt to calculate time periods beyond daylight hours. For many ancient peoples "the Earth and the Moon were understood as a whole, as a single body endowed with two forms, the Moon-was-another-Earth". Our reflection in the night mirror. Our double in perpetual transformation.
“From the sum of the daytime sky and the night sky, an archaic conception of the encompassing has always resulted”, writes the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Making the sky speak. Religion as theopoetry (Siruela). But modernity secularized it and "the sky lost its meaning as a cosmic symbol of immunity, it became the prototype of the arbitrariness in which human objectives are lost in the distance." One need only remember, in this regard, the fact that the journey that Jules Verne imagined in From the Earth to the Moon (Alliance) is due to the advancement of ballistics in the United States. The novel's protagonist, Impey Barbicane, is a ballistics entrepreneur, a brilliant artilleryman. If musicians are born in Italy and metaphysicians in Germany, says the French writer, the Yankees have a predisposition to be engineers.
The scientific and satirical novel was published in 1865. Exactly 104 years later, the Apollo 11 mission ship, manned by Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins, made the first moon landing in human history. And the feat was broadcast all over the planet. Other NASA astronauts stepped on the satellite eleven other times. The last time that happened was in December 1972, when Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of the Apollo 17 mission took three sidewalks. Fifty years have passed since then. Half a century without returning to the Moon.
But in all that time, literature and the rest of the artistic and narrative languages have not stopped coming back. The people who have flown over it or have stepped on it have become chiaroscuro legends. In Return to Earth (Storm Grey), an anthology of texts written by space travelers, Yuri Gagarin makes a comment that becomes tragic in light of his biography: "I wanted to observe the Moon, to understand what it looks like in the cosmos. But unfortunately, during the time of the flight, her silhouette was out of my field of vision. "Well," I thought, "I'll see her on the next flight." On April 12, 1961, she spent 108 minutes in outer space. He was the first human being to leave Earth. He died in 1968, at the age of 34. There was no next flight.
The development of audiovisual technology, in parallel to the books and documentaries that the Russian and North American missions have recounted, has made it possible to bring the panoramas and sensations of space flights closer to the general public in the field of both fiction and simulation. . One of the best immersive experiences ever designed and produced is The Moon , by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang: virtual reality allows you to walk through its oscillations and contemplate it, fascinated, from its heights.
On November 16, the Artemis I mission was launched bound for lunar orbit. If all goes according to plan, in 2025 Artemis III will once again take humans to the Moon. And shortly after the construction of the base that will allow astronauts to Mars will begin. It is a project led by NASA in which various space agencies (European, Canadian, Japanese) and various private companies (such as SpaceX) collaborate. Because the new space race is not being promoted only by public institutions. Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have seen a new commercial horizon in the stratosphere, our satellite and Martian exploration. It is what Inma Martínez has called the fifth industrial revolution (Deusto), the stage that is now beginning, in which the cosmos becomes "a new vital and economic reality". An era that has its protagonists and is generating its own epic. And his own picaresque.
If some of the conquerors of America became the best chroniclers of those decades full of violence, feats, and contradictions, in books that we still read with interest, the chronicle of NASA's tireless space exploration is now mainly in the form of accounts. Twitter and Instagram profiles. And the narrative of the new corporate epic is shaped mostly by Netflix documentaries. Will they be exhibited in some way when a museum on the Solar System opens on Mars in the 22nd century? Probably not, because they are stories in real time, very anchored to the present and with a clear vocation for virality.
There are three audiovisual products that have told the story of how Elon Musk has created a low-cost space travel company: MARS: Inside SpaceX (2018), by Julia Reagan; Countdown: Space Mission Inspiration4 (2021) directed by Jason Hehir; and Return to Space (2022), directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The three agree in pointing out that SpaceX has been able to compete in innovation and solutions with NASA itself because its logic and operations are those of a startup and not those of a ministry. All three are highly suspected of self-promotion.
The Countdown series proposes a reality show narrative in five chapters that concludes with a very contemporary moral: the four crew members of a space flight are as normal and ordinary people as you or me. One of them wins a raffle, another is selected in a viral art contest, the third is chosen for having survived childhood cancer and the fourth is Jared Isaacman, a millionaire investor, who is the only one who pays for his place and, for extension, the protagonist of the series. It is the utopia of social networks: in the new horizontal world, anyone can be an astronaut. But the 20th century continues to remind us of the importance of training, study, merit: the media discourse on Pablo Álvarez and Sara García, the first Spanish astronauts selected by the European Space Agency in the last thirty years, reminds us that they are an engineer and a biotechnologist.
If the first stage of the space race was led by the United States and the Soviet Union, the second will be the result of cooperation between state space agencies and some companies. SpaceX stands out because it has created the first reusable rockets in history. The technical facts, however, are distorted by the messianic rhetoric of Musk, who repeats over and over again that the destiny of humanity is to be a multi-planetary species, while activists remind him, also insistently, that there is no planet B. There is consensus, however, that the rovers that are mapping Mars constitute the prologue to the presence of men and women on the red planet.
The protagonists of the SpaceX advertorials on the platforms, whether they are managers or engineers or four unexpected cosmonauts, appear according to the rhetoric of self-improvement. Some of them are even seen climbing mountains, flying airplanes, pounding themselves in the gym. They are represented as pioneers. But the reference horizon is not the conquest of the West, despite being Americans, but the exploration of the oceans.
The cinema and series of our time are rewriting the story of how we crossed the border of the stratosphere and are opening a path towards landing, because it is known that fiction, while always being inspired by real events, also programs future realities .
After the first two seasons of For All Mankind (Apple TV), in which the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was narrated after the pioneering arrival of the Russians on the Moon, the third season has introduced a private corporation into the space competition. . Finally, the three ships have to cooperate in an adventure that will only be possible if the powers pool resources and energy. Because the ethics of maritime navigation prevail, Mars is a space as far away as it is extreme and the greatest technological projects of our time, the ones that really change our perspective, are absolutely collective. The James Webb Space Telescope has been the fruit of the work of fourteen countries.
The mission that narrates the series Away (Netflix), precisely, is manned by five astronauts: from the United Kingdom, China, India, Russia and the United States. “It's a privilege to be here,” Commander Green says as she gazes up at the Moon's sky in the pilot episode. From the Alpha Lunar Base the ship that takes them to Mars is launched. In James Gray's film Ad Astra, the Moon is primarily a decaying space base and a desert taken over by pirates, who plunder the natural resources on the far side of the satellite. The protagonist, although he belongs to SpaceCom, the space body of the United States, arrives on a commercial flight. The Moon is a privatized space. From there, his ship is launched towards Mars. From there it will continue towards Neptune.
They are accustoming us to the idea that our satellite is going to become, above all, the headquarters of the space base that will allow us to continue our journey to the furthest reaches. A springboard, an accelerator, a launch pad. Very shortly after we conquered it, in fact, the Moon ceased to be of interest in itself and became an intermediary between humanity and Mars, the limits of the Solar System, the rest of the galaxy and the universe. Images being sent back to us by rovers from Mars have reactivated our desire for a lunar residence.
It is the height of extractivist logic: we have emptied it of meaning. At least as a celestial body, as an external object. Because we not only see it in the sky every day, it accompanies us like menstruation or the beauty of each sunset.
“What we can discover through new technologies, such as satellite imaging, is simply amazing,” writes Sarah Parcak in Archeology from Space (Ariel). And she adds: "He is helping us to rewrite history." Now the deposits are discovered from a bird's eye view and only later are they excavated at ground level. Digital cartographies find meanings that until now were invisible in the various layers of orography and erosion. In this way, the aerial and future look allows us to change our knowledge of the remote past.
This zoom movement from above has also become common in environmental sciences or the control of human traffic. In fact, all of us move around the world with the awareness of being that little dot that Google Maps or Google Earth points out to us. The satellite look has become completely everyday. And, conversely, telescopes have multiplied in homes around the world and the social networks of NASA or the European Space Agency have accustomed us to contemplating the Solar System and distant galaxies as if they were part of our domestic constellation. . When you scroll on Twitter or Instagram, the landscape of Mars, the Pleiades, the open clusters, the exoplanets or the Andromeda galaxy follow one another at the same rate as the memes, the news or the kittens.
In the narratives and informative discourses of that universe of universes that has unfolded before our eyes over the last fifty years, the Moon plays the same role that we see in space development programs or in the series and movies that prefigure them: it is the starting point towards increasingly distant goals. Thus, the first image that we find in Planetarium (Impedimenta), the fascinating paper museum of outer space, illustrated by Chris Wormell and written by Raman Prinja, is that of our satellite. And in chapter 2 of Toshifumi Futamase and Toshihiro Nakamaru's Great Visual Guide to the Cosmos (Blackie Books), the Moon is deconstructed into highlands, craters, vertical holes, and lunar eclipses, phases, and maria. It is the introduction of everything that awaits us beyond.
A beyond of which we have more and more precise maps and of which, although light years are average units of space and not of time, we know its past with an astonishing degree of detail. That's why Bang!! The complete history of the universe (Oberon), by Brian May, Patrick Moore, Chris Lintott and Hannah Wakeford –updated edition of the famous popular astrophysics book– dares to tell us the entire chronology of reality. Because radio telescopes and space telescopes do not stop feeding our dissection and indexing of the corners of the cosmos. And children's books and series, BBC television programs and documentaries, or popular works transmit part of that knowledge and convert it into common currency.
The half century that has elapsed without us stepping foot on the Moon is a great metaphor for how the future happens: without completing so many processes that seemed inevitable. We'll see when and how we install a lunar base and get to Mars or not. And whether or not the universe is as we believed in 2022. Like that of space exploration, the future of the Moon remains open and uncertain. There is only one certainty: it will continue to create symbols, stories and ideas.
