You Will Not Go to the Moon
A three-stage rocket propels a spacecraft and its occupants to a docking with a wheel-shaped rotating space station. The occupants disembark and spend an indeterminate, although presumably short, period of time in the relative comfort of the station's artificial gravity before boarding a second spacecraft. The second spacecraft undocks, makes a single trans-lunar insertion burn, and three days later completes a soft landing on the surface of the Moon.
By now you're probably thinking that yes, you've seen that movie at least a half dozen times—maybe even read the book—but this isn't a description of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, or of Stanley Kubrick's visualization of 2001. In 1959, nearly a decade before the Clarke/Kubrick book-and-movie combo, Mae and Ira Freeman published a story of an Earth orbit rendezvous Moon mission in their illustrated children's book You Will Go to the Moon. The story's protagonist is a young boy who goes on to participate in a lunar EVA—complete with a lunar rover ride—and visit a lunar base after the landing, all seemingly for funsies. At the time the book went into print, Sputnik and Explorer 1 were recent memories, while Vostok 1 and Mercury-Redstone 3 were still in the near future. The book was intended to teach key concepts about the then new art of spacefaring to young readers. The choice of title and the storytelling technique made the material engaging by allowing the reader to place himself or herself in the story. For countless Boomers and Generation X-ers who checked the book out from their school libraries though, the title felt more like a promise, a promise not so much broken as impossible to fulfill in the first place.
Ten years later, humans did land and conduct EVAs on the Moon, albeit using the lunar orbit rendezvous mission mode. By the early '70s, having proven that we could land on the Moon before the Russians, and weighed down by the expense of the war in Vietnam and a range of social concerns at home, the United States shifted priorities, and ended the Apollo Moon landings. There were to be no lunar bases, no permanent human presence on the Moon. During the decades that followed, unstaffed spacecraft would explore the Solar System, human spaceflight would concentrate entirely on low Earth orbit, and participation in human spaceflight would be reserved for shit hot pilots and people with lots of letters after their names.
That last part about the exclusivity of human spaceflight seemed set to change in the early 2000s. With Richard Branson's announcement of the founding of Virgin Galactic, space would become accessible seemingly to anyone who made it a priority. Sure, a flight that barely nicked the Kármán line and allowed its passengers to experience free fall for six minutes would set you back about half a mil, but we'd seen this sort of thing before. When VCRs first appeared, they were a plaything for the well-to-do; on the eve of the DVD format breaking onto the scene, consumer electronics retailers could hardly give the things away. A CD player went for nearly a grand (more like $3000, in today's dollars) in 1983 and were selling for well under a hundred bucks in the 2000s. Nobody could reasonably expect a trip to space to fall to a price similar to a flight from LA to Chicago, but if the price could ultimately drop into five figures—or even the low six figures—then a visit to space could be within the reach of members of the middle class who valued such an experience more than, say, a recreational vehicle or a vacation home.
Over twenty years later it hasn't turned out that way, and likely never will. Getting off of this rock takes energy. Getting off of this rock and getting back onto it alive takes specialized hardware that might never be possible to scale up to the mass market. A number of competitors have joined Virgin Galactic in the space tourism market, but beyond the original two groups of highly skilled pilots and brilliant academics, access to space has only been opened up to two additional groups: the wealthy and the well connected.
On 14 April, 2025, Blue Origin launched their NS-31 mission, with an all-female passenger list that included pop singer-songwriter Katy Perry, CBS Mornings host Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, fiancée of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. Although the flight lasted less than eleven minutes, it somehow managed to squeeze in enough cringe to last long after Katy Perry emerged from the spacecraft and kissed the ground. The cringe actually got started well ahead of launch day when Perry boasted about studying string theory to prepare for the mission, something clearly intended to sound impressive while having little to do with the brute-force classical physics of hucking seventy-five metric tons of spacecraft into the sky and then letting it fall. In describing Katy Perry's antics, Ellen Cushing wrote in The Atlantic that "Perry is a special kind of celebrity—the sort who doesn't seem to mind looking kind of stupid." Space historian and author Amy Shira Teitel described the flight and all the hype over its passenger manifest as "Performative Feminism 101".
Cushing and Teitel were far from the only disapproving voices. Criticism and outright mockery of the performative nature of the flight was nearly immediate and universal. Pushback from the poor, misunderstood demigods who undertook the daring journey was equally immediate. Responding to critics of the mission, Gayle King said, "Have you been [to space]? If you’ve been and you still feel that way after you come back, please, let’s have a conversation." Ms. King's rhetorical question was probably meant to re-center the conversation on the profundity of the experience, expressed by astronauts since the earliest days of human spaceflight, of seeing our fragile world from outside the atmosphere, but it comes off as a taunt. Have you been to space? I have. Of all the people who have ever lived, I am one of the millionth of a percent who have ventured more than a hundred kilometers from the surface. You ordinary people will live and die on the ground having never even passed the tropopause, and you don't even have the decency to show the appropriate deference to those of us who (for at least ten minutes) are literally above you.
We're not even a quarter of the way in, yet you can just tell that future historians will have a lot to say about the twenty-first century. Space tourism is on track to go down as the biggest yawner of our time, a glorified carnival ride for the rich and famous.
You will not go to the moon. That ship—if such a ship even existed—sailed a long time ago. The best we can hope for is to share the experience of space vicariously through the photography of Don Pettit, or through the few fleeting words exchanged over amateur radio with Kjell Lindgren, or through the countless people on orbit and on the ground who work to expand our knowledge of our world and our universe. Many, perhaps most, of these people give the impression of genuine humility and a sense of the responsibility that comes with occupying such a unique place in the human story. I'll take that over dumb celebrity stunts any day.
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