Space oddity
Casting light on the Moon
The Economist’s briefings editor has written a fascinating, thought-provoking and, above all, very different book about the Moon
EVERY 29 days, according to an article published in Science magazine in May 1995, the global temperature fluctuates by 200ths of a degree Celsius. This is because the Moon, when it is full, reflects a whole lunar surface-worth of distant sunlight onto the terrestrial night and Earth is measurably warmer than it would be at the Moon’s crescent, or even in its gibbous phase.
In this, and many other imperceptible ways, the Moon has an effect on the Earth. It lights our night, it subtly prolongs our days, its gravitational tug washes our estuaries, rinses our harbours and erodes our cliffs, and it keeps the Earth’s axis of rotation on a more or less stable tilt. This stability may have made possible the sustained evolution of microbial life, then complex creatures and, finally, questioning bipeds. If the great-splat-in-the-sky theory is correct, and the Earth and Moon are the surviving products of an unimaginable traffic accident in orbit around the sun, then something of our planet now belongs to up there. We owe a lot to the Moon.
Its pale face reflects humanity’s hopes and fears, and offers a faintly-marked surface on which to sketch our dreams. Fifty years ago this summer, and 240,000 miles (386,243km) from home, American astronauts began a series of brief walks on the dusty lunar surface. This period of direct contact lasted six visits during a trifling three years. The view from the Moon revealed the beauty and fragility of our own blue planet. The Apollo program was cancelled prematurely, and the wider world lost interest in the Moon. This loss was, and is, mourned by a class of enthusiasts later to be labelled “orphans of Apollo”: those who had hoped to see Apollo as the beginning of a great adventure.
Since then, no astronaut or cosmonaut has travelled much more than 300 miles in a vertical direction. But we can dream, and we can despatch robots to look at the lunar terrain. And one day, humans could step out onto the far side of the Moon. A vast corpus has looked back at the great fact of the Moon landings, and a vastly bigger body of science-fiction has already extended the adventure.
Oliver Morton, The Economist’s briefings editor, is one of those orphans of Apollo. He has written not just a very good book about the Moon but even more admirably, a different one. It is good because it is superbly well-written and enjoyably organised. It is different because it looks beyond Apollo towards the future: the Moonbase as a technological challenge, an economic gamble and as a testbed for the much more dangerous missions to Mars. Much of the information you might hope to find—its mass, topography, petrology, orbit, the nature of its surface, what it takes to get there and the folklore it has inspired—is tautly arranged in separate chapters. The lunar role in post-Copernican discovery and the great adventures of Apollo are necessarily but freshly recounted, the latter with clever use of dialogue spoken on the Moon itself, and to mission control back on Earth.
A little like Norman Mailer in his book, “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1970), Mr Morton bookends his tale with some of his own responses to the moon, space launchers and the lunar light. He brings an enviable knowledge of science-fiction literature to focus on the uneasy futures we imagine for this hostile homestead-to-be (including a prison and labour camp from which, once deported, there can be no return).
Finally he brings a reporter’s direct experience of encounters with tomorrow’s lunarnauts: the giants of private enterprise and innovation who may, and perhaps will, provide the impetus and the hardware for a new age of exploration and exploitation. These include Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin and Elon Musk of SpaceX. Mr Bezos is described as well-motivated. So, too, is Mr Musk, with the rider that he is “also a prick. Not an irredeemable arsehole, though he has recently looked more like one than he used to…” Really? So what? Which powerful man could not, at some time, have merited such a judgment? Even so, that mix of forthrightness and observation is part of what makes the book a pleasure to read.
【五月份】经济学人
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