For as long as humans have existed, we’ve stared in wonder at the ever-changing shape in the night sky. On the 55th anniversary of the 1969 Moon landing (and with the first since 1972 scheduled for 2026), Esquire counts down 55 things we know about the satellite so far
1. It is not a planet. It is more accurately, a satellite planet, or a natural satellite, or a planetary mass object that rotates around both the Sun and the Earth.
2. Pliny the Elder called it “a remedy for the shadows of darkness”.
3. Once a place of imagination, it is now a place of exploitation. We’ve recently returned to the Moon on an unmanned exploratory mission, we’re soon going back with people, we’re going to build on it and live there and we shall fight over who owns what.
4. By “we” we mean not just the Americans and the Russians, which used to be the case when Lulu was in the charts, but missions planned and financed by China, India, Japan, Australia, Canada, Finland and even Europe.
5. By “the Americans” we mean not specifically Nasa but private enterprise. The robotic lander Odysseus, which touched down at the end of February, was designed by Intuitive Machines, a private aerospace company in Houston, and it was launched by a SpaceX rocket. Nasa was renting space aboard it, a much more cost-effective solution than controlling the entire enterprise.
6. There are many reasons to go back: tourism; the mining of precious materials; pure scientific research that will tell us more about the history of both the Moon and the Earth. Given our present predicaments, it may even provide an escape route.
7. The space journalist David W Brown has located another reason. “My overall impression is that Nasa wants to go to the Moon because it wants to go to the Moon,” he wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year. “For the past 50 years, it has been trying to get back there. Any reason anyone wants to cite will do just fine.”
8. The grand scheme is called Artemis, and the schedule is exciting. 2025: Astronauts fly around the Moon and back. 2026: Two astronauts land on the lunar south pole in SpaceX’s Human Landing System. The same year will see the launch of Gateway, the new international lunar space station. 2028: Nasa flies its own team of astronauts to Gateway. The overall plan is to establish a permanent, fission-powered outpost.
9. The south pole is increasingly seen as the most rewarding lunar location in terms of mining and sustainability, and potentially providing — after some chemical transmutation — both breathable air and fuel. Crucially, the south pole may contain ice, with craters so deep that they have never been warmed by the Sun.
10. All of this became feasible in 2020, when eight countries signed the Artemis Accords, a peaceable co-operating agreem
