Human spaceflight has been racking up new milestones. But we’re still grappling with a fundamental question: Why go in the first place?
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles.
While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of Apollo 11—a spectacle that 20% of the world population watched live—Artemis II still attracted massive public interest. It drew tens of millions of viewers and inspired outpourings of “moon joy,” a term coined spontaneously during the mission that became a viral sensation.
The expedition is only the first in a planned series of ambitious missions. The Artemis program aims to establish a human base on the south pole of the moon, operated by the US and its international and commercial partners, during the 2030s. China and Russia have teamed up to build their own crewed lunar base in the same region and on a similar timeline. Meanwhile, companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX hope to lock down the burgeoning extraterrestrial tourism market by flying civilian astronauts on private missions, with the long-term dream of taking them to the moon—or even Mars.
But some overarching questions about this new era of space exploration linger, including perhaps the most existential one of all: What’s the point? Launching humans into space is dangerous and expensive, and it’s unclear whether it can deliver a better return on investment than we’d get if we were to send robots in our stead to make scientific discoveries or to conduct commercial activities, such as mining.
Since the dawn of human spaceflight, this line of questioning has been met with countless answers. We go to space for geopolitical prestige, manifest destiny, spiritual fulfillment, scientific curiosity, and, increasingly, business opportunities.
In the wake of Artemis II, a slew of new books suggest that these justifications are subsumed by one unifying fact: Humans have itchy feet, and we are simply wired to roam. No matter the merits of any single rationale for sending people to space, they are all downstream of the basic evolutionary instinct to expand and adapt, which may not require much rational explanation at all.
Indeed, in her new book, The Ultraview Effect, the space anthropologist Deana L. Weibel frames human space exploration as an extension of our ancient compulsion to embark on pilgrimages, often facing perilous obstacles, in order to experience revelations about our universe. Eiman Jahangir, who recounts his journey to space with Blue Origin in A Heart for Space, is one of a growing number of these new-age civilian space pilgrims. And in his memoir Dinner with an Astronaut, coauthored with writer Victoria Bruce, former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao concludes that people simply “need to know what’s on the other side.”
“We go into space because we want to explore,” Weibel told me. “We want to see what it’s like to walk on another world.”
This simple motivation for human spaceflight is usually framed as aspirational: Explore new places, break new ground, adapt environments to suit our needs. But as our presence in space expands, we are bound to bring along the same human foibles that have stymied us on Earth. Frontiers like the moon and Mars will no longer be some hazy dreamlands onto which we can project our hopes, values, and favorite visions from science fiction. They will be workspaces for astronauts, places of commerce, military domains, tourist destinations, and heritage sites.
How we deal with all that is, literally, up in the air. At the moment, a relatively small group of players in human spaceflight have an outsize role in determining the path forward, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk standing as the most conspicuous example. But shrugging off the drive to leave Earth as an itch for exploration and domination that only nation-states and the ultrarich can scratch won’t cut it any more. Now is the time for everyone who cares about space exploration, no matter their backgrounds, to advocate for their own visions of our off-Earth future—before it is decided for them.
During the Apollo era, the justification for blasting astronauts into space was clear-cut: brinkmanship. As Cold War tensions peaked in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had every reason to demonstrate their technological prowess through human spaceflight.
To be sure, the feat of sending humans to the moon inspired millions of people, many of whom went on to work in science and engineering. Chiao credits his own career as an astronaut to the Apollo 11 landing, which he watched, riveted, as an eight-year-old child in Wichita, Kansas. Decades later, he flew three space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station.
But while early milestones were met with giddy excitement, the space race was fundamentally animated by an implicit threat. Whichever nation proved superior in space could easily trade nuclear warheads for the astronauts it was launching on rockets that were essentially modified missiles.
Fortunately, we are no longer on the brink of nuclear war <knock on wood>. NASA is, however, making an overt case that America is embroiled in a new space race, this time with China. Whereas the US and the USSR used spaceflight as a symbolic proxy for global technological dominance, Chiao told me in an interview that the new first-place prize could be uncontested access to valuable resources such as water, which could be sourced from ice patches on the south pole of the moon.
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