The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton
The Moon has mystified and captivated humans since time immemorial and is has been vital to many cultures around the world. It was associated with the cult and mythology, and for hundreds, or maybe thousands of years it was something that we yearned for but couldn’t reach. At the beginning of the twentieth century, rocket pioneers started to explore the possibility of interplanetary travel and imagined huge platforms orbiting the Earth, a starting point for missions to the Moon and Mars. They dreamed of other worlds and at the same time they were trying to imagine what our planet might look like from space.
And then following Yuri Gagarin’ s successful orbit mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced to the American nation a goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. Apollo project was the largest non-military technological endeavour ever undertaken by the United States and its goals, besides achieving pre-eminence in space for the United States, were to carrying out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon and developing man's capability to work in the lunar environment.
In less than a decade, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission beamed back to earth the first television footage of American astronauts on the moon. It was a groundbreaking moment in humanity’s history. Six Apollo missions followed the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing. The last time humans touched the Moon was on December 1972, with the Apollo 17 mission. This was not only the final Moon landing, but the last time humans left low Earth orbit. It was 47 years ago.
But something is going to happen again, says Oliver Morton. “The Return to the Moon is coming, and it will be undertaken by men and women from many other places, and with more agendas, than were in the American vanguard of 50 years ago.”
I am not really sure what I expected when I started reading The Moon: A History for the Future but I certainly didn’t expect art and poetry and science-fiction. The Moon is a fascinating, informative and wide-ranging book.
Oliver Morton explores the Moon’s orbit, appearance and surface, and how the Moon affects the flow of the ocean tides, he delves into the history, to the Cold War space race, and he examines the possibility of a human colony on the moon- in one of these networks of caves where astronauts would be safe from radiation, micro-meteorites, and the Moon’s extreme temperatures perhaps-in the not-too-distant future. He discusses the attempts of private enterprises to reach the Moon and reopen the lunar frontier, using it as a stepping stone to other destinations such as Mars. He also captures the Moon’s place in science-fiction, Robert Heinlein’s in particular, and the technological, social and political challenges faced by a future Luna colony.
I thoroughly enjoyed the references on Robert Heinlein’s political speculations about Lunar colonies. Heinlein was one of the founding greats of the genera, but his vision about societies is deeply patriarchal. As they were written in the 1950s it is not surprising that females barely exist in these stories. Heinlein’s Moon is a man’s world. We, women, have still many obstacles to overcome but I think we can safely argue that if we were to build a Moon colony in the next decade or so, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon makes more sense in imagining our future on the Moon.