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. But as our presence in space expands, we are bound to bring along the same human foibles that have stymied us on Earth.
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