dearMoon: The Quest to Reach the Airless Pearl

For millions of years, it has been a siren song in the night sky, daring human beings to dream, luring them into the shoals of airless space. The Moon beckoned like Moby Dick, showing its craggy face every month or so and then vanishing into memory. The Moon has always been a primer about the clockwork precision of nature, moving from sliver to orb in a specified time and raising and lowering all boats twice a day as Earth took humanity for a spin. For ancient humankind, the Moon was part of a Greek tragedy, a soap opera in the sky with players who fought for dominance, laughed, loved, danced, drank and died. As technology progressed, it became a sort of cosmic smartphone that could illuminate a dusty road at night and help keep track of the ebb and flow of tides. The Moon became an understudy to the brilliant star that kept it visible, a utility infielder that never sought glory for itself but still exerted a tidal pull on the millions of lives below.

The Moon has had some bad press along the way, lambasted as an airless rock that had been pelted by meteors for millions of years. Bullied and scarred by the universe, the Moon was nevertheless our airless rock, formed, it is said, by a collision with another world and trapped by gravity in a face-to-face dance with the watery planet it orbited. That airless rock became an airless pearl, inspiring art, romance and, yes, science. The imperfect species who once hunted carnivores with primitive tools now began to hunt for answers with tools of greater sophistication. Galileo’s looking glass became mountaintop magnifiers, and the Moon became tantalizingly close.

         The mechanized age made soaring through the sky possible, bringing continents within hours of each other. And the winds of war made technological advance inevitable, producing cylinders that used Newton’s laws to rise into the sky on a bed of fire and rain down destruction on enemy lands. When the warriors went home, the scientists and engineers replaced them as custodians of the cylinders.  And they dreamed of using those same cylinders to bring the airless pearl within reach for the first time.

         In October of 1957, a beeping sphere called Sputnik 1 signaled to East and West alike that the era of space had arrived. Less than four years later, two men on different parts of the planet parted with Earth and inaugurated the era of crewed spaceflight. And less than five years later, a forty-something president with tousled hair and lofty dreams asked a nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

         Three men rode a cylinder aloft in July of 1969, and two of them set foot on the airless pearl. The chalk-white orb that had been a beacon of dreams for thousands of generations was “one small step” away. Touchdown. Goal achieved. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the Moon, described it as “magnificent desolation.” And Archibald MacLeish wrote, “Presence among us.” 

         Five more missions, five more touchdowns, ten more feet on the Moon. And then, it was over. The era of exploration was replaced by un-magnificent desolation.

         But space remained a presence among us as humankind settled into low Earth orbit. Test pilots, technologists and even a teacher set out to “slip the surly bonds of Earth.” Some did not make it. We honor their courage. And space remains peopled, and it has been peopled for years.

         And Earth grew more connected Lower communication costs put people from Bishkek to Berlin to Baltimore within keystrokes of each other. Supply chains transformed the world into a web of dependence. Shopping malls rose and fell like ancient Rome on fast-forward. A single smartphone contained billions of transistors and was capable of more than the entire Apollo mission.

         The technological imperative that guided the 1990s and persisted through the first decades of the twenty-first century invariably tilted skyward. Where once there had been a space race, now there was a space economy. Where once the Apollo program had aimed to blaze a trail to the Moon, now the Artemis program aimed to create a highway. Where once the space race had been the exclusive province of government, now the space economy became the province of dreamers in all spheres.

         And now, for the first time, comes the opportunity for the people who spend their earthbound lives in the civilian attire of work and play to take the ultimate trip to the airless pearl, the place that had inspired their workaday dreams as it hung over lakes, oceans and fields of harvested wheat. They come from the hamlets, villages and cities of the world, hundreds-of-thousands of them, all with a dream of being a witness to magnificent desolation. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, they come to “see further” as they “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

         And they have a message for the airless pearl, flawed, battered and bullied by the universe as it is:

         Dear Moon,

         We used to watch you sail through the sky. Now, we invite you to sail with us.

Jerry Edling is an applicant for dearMoon. He is a three-time Emmy Award nominee and a five-time Writers Guild of America award nominee. His chapter “The Pandemic and the Medical Enlightenment: The View From 2035” is included in the book “Aftershocks and Opportunities: Scenarios for a Post-Pandemic Future.” #dearMoonCrew #dearMoon @dearMoonProject @yousuckMZ #space