Pliny the Elder called it “a remedy for the shadows of darkness”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

All of this became feasible in 2020, when eight countries signed the Artemis Accords, a peaceable co-operating agreement regarding research and the preservation of lunar sites. It’s an unofficial adjunct to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, signed by 109 nations, which regulates (among other things) who owns the Moon. Among its bullet points: No one owns the Moon, no matter the flags planted thereon. No one can place weapons of mass destruction in outer space. Astronauts are representatives of humanity and shall be given immediate emergency treatment as required. Each signatory is responsible for their own space machines and should do everything possible to eliminate the prospect of danger to others or contamination of space in general.

That said, you too may own the Moon. The International Lunar Lands Authority (ILLA) is offering real estate at several nice locations, including in the Sea of Clouds, the Sea of Tranquility and the Lunar Alps. Feeling a little romantic (blame it on the moonlight rather than the boogie, I think) Esquire inquired about the possibility of a desirable residence at (or perhaps in) the Lake of Dreams. The plot is right by Crater M Jackson, named after the white-socked moon-walker himself, who bought the deed before he died. Our own five acres will cost us $42.68 per acre. (A multi-buy saving of 15 per cent against buying individual acres!) For that, you get an engraved deed, a photo of your pad and some NFT nonsense. The cost is subject to dynamic pricing, so no time wasters. The small print: the ILLA offers a registry of claims, so Esquire is not allowed to build or sell ice-creams on our crater/lake. But our claim may be sub-let (ie presentation-gifted).

It has been 52 years since the last crewed landing of Apollo 17 in 1972, a mission that included not only men but mice. The five mice — Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey (please, this is real) — did not go walkabout, but stayed in the command module for six days and four hours, circling the Moon 75 times. One of the mice died, and when the four surviving ones returned to Earth they were not offered an Omega but killed and examined for clues.

The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but about 400 times nearer to the Earth. This is what makes a complete solar eclipse possible, with both Moon and Sun temporarily appearing as the same size. If you missed the one in Mexico and North America in April, and you think you may not be alive for the next one in the UK in 2090, stand by for the next partial eclipse visible in the UK in 2026.

No one in the space business calls the dark side of the Moon “the dark side”. It is the far side.

His appearance in the film Apollo 13 was not the apotheosis of Tom Hanks’s connection with the Moon — far from it. Promoting his audiovisual extravaganza The Moonwalkers in King’s Cross, in which he takes ticket holders to the Moon’s very pixelated surface, he told Graham Norton that he first tried to recreate a zero-gravitational experience as a child in his paddling pool, an event that involved putting a brick down the back of his trunks and sucking on a hose. Which reminds us:

At the end of his first Moon walk, Neil Armstrong supposedly sent a final, barely audible message back to Houston, resulting in the best joke about the Moon we know. Clambering back into the landing module, he uttered: “Good luck, Mr Gorsky.” Nothing to do with the Russians — the Gorskys were neighbours of the Armstrong family when young Neil was growing up in Ohio. When, many years later, Mr Gorsky had died, Armstrong felt able to reveal what the cryptic message meant. As a teen, he once heard Mrs Gorsky tell her husband that her sexual desires were rather less vivid than his. No amount of pleading on his part would change her mind. Or, as she put it, “You’ll get oral sex when the kid next-door walks on the moon!” Oh, if only this were true.

Seven years before he died, in 2012, Neil Armstrong pondered a question only he could answer: did he actually say or mean to say “That’s one small step for a man”, rather than just “one small step for man”? His answer, essentially, was maybe. “I’m not particularly articulate,” he told his biographer James R Hansen. “Perhaps it was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mic. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time for the word to be there… Certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable.”

The first accurate, pre-telescopic drawings of markings on the Moon were long thought to be made by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 1500s. But the geoscientist Scott Montgomery has detected realistic shadings of the Moon in at least three paintings by Jan van Eyck, almost a century earlier. The first sketches of the Moon drawn from a telescope, showing seas and craters, were by the Englishman Thomas Harriot in 1609, a year before Galileo. Astonishingly, his work remained obscure until the 1960s. Before then, he was known for his connection with Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, for which he was arrested.

Galileo’s sightings of mountains on the Moon, initially ridiculed, proved to be accurate. But he did not call them that, just as he did not call the craters “craters”. In fact he didn’t name any parts of the Moon at all on his drawings, preferring merely “prominences” and “cavities”. The important point for him was that the Moon had discernible features and was not just a smooth mass.

The Moon was once considered an alternative to Botany Bay. In 1885, Reverend Timothy Harley published Moon Lore, noting that mythically it was regarded as “a penal colony, to which egregious offenders were transported; or prison cage, in which, behind bars of light, miserable sinners were to be exposed to all eternity, as a warning to the excellent of the Earth”.

In antiquity, the Moon was almost always feminine, often a sister or daughter of the Sun. The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, credited with being the first astronomer, saw the Earth as a cylindrical disc floating freely but motionless at the centre of everything, with the Moon and Sun spinning around it on its own “wheels”, perhaps even a wheel on a celestial chariot. His successor Anaximenes of Miletus described the Moon as a floating leaf, and one that disappeared each morning behind northern mountains. (The Ancient Greeks didn’t quite get the Sun right either: Heraclitus believed that the Sun and the Moon were bowls full of fire that rotated, thus explaining lunar phases.)

In 1860, the weekly journal All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, published a feature on the Moon that found that some believed it had an effect on childbirth, the marrow of animals, an adult’s weight, and the healing of wounds. Also, the Moon affected “deranged persons, hence called lunatics”.

If you ask ChatGPT “what does the Moon want?”, it replies that “the concept of what the Moon ‘wants’ is often explored in literature, mythology, and folklore rather than in scientific terms”. From a scientific perspective, with its behaviour governed by the laws of physics, “the Moon doesn’t possess consciousness or desires…” Believe this if you want.

Unlike Uranus (first seen in 1781) or Pluto (1930), the Moon has never been “discovered”, but it was observed by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians. Each civilisation used the Moon to construct their lunar calendars.

The Moon smells of spent fire. On this, the astronauts agree — the acrid smell penetrated helmets. Buzz Aldrin detected the scent of doused ashes, while Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt divined the aroma of gunpowder.

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–1771) cites the invaluable assistance of telescopes in locating “high mountains, large valleys, and deep cavities”, while also referring to “the Almighty” acting “with infinite wisdom”, creating “so many glorious suns, fit for so many important purposes”, cleverly placing them “at such distances from one another”.

As of February this year, the Moon holds all the knowledge known to man, or something like it. The most recent landing by the Odysseus spacecraft contained a digital copy of the whole of Wikipedia in English, all 4.5 billion words of it — one word for each year the Moon has existed.

Apollo 11’s landing spacecraft did happen. Then again, the fake moon landing really happened too, most popularly on Twitter/X “with Stanley Kubrick directing”. Very dedicated loonies are still up all night trying to show how shadows couldn’t have possibly fallen the way they did.

There is a plausible theory that suggests that the Moon exists principally as a useful adjunct of the world of horology. The Moon has lent its story to more fine watches than any other heavenly body, beginning with the lunar Omega Speedmaster of 1969 and peaking this year with the Omega Snoopy Speedmaster MoonSwatch. Had to happen.

It had to happen because Snoopy has been associated with more adventures on the Moon than any other beagle. The official creature and soft toy of the entire Apollo programme, and very much part of the visuals in the marketing of Artemis, Snoopy came under devastating scrutiny in the 2019 Peanuts In Space documentary, in which Jeff Goldblum and Ron Howard posit that he may have got to the Moon several months before the crew of Apollo 11.

Wallace and Gromit only got there in A Grand Day Out in 1989, but by then they a) didn’t need space suits, helmets, or any additional oxygenation; b) could have a nice picnic involving cheese sliced from the Moon itself; c) were chased by Cooker, the fastidious coin-operated space junk from a previous mission, who wants to return to Earth with them but instead ends up Moon-skiing. Progress, of the melancholy type. (Gromit’s Aardman Animations pal Shaun the Sheep went around the Moon in 2022 as part of the European Space Agency’s involvement in Nasa’s Artemis 1 launch, another nice section of our Complete History of Animated Earthlings in Orbit PhD thesis.)

“Best songs about the Moon that DON’T have the word ‘moon’ in their titles” is the subject of a rewarding Reddit forum. Selections include “Sleeping Satellite” by Tasmin Archer, “Mirrorball” by Elbow, “Just One Of Those Things” by Cole Porter and “Rocket Man” by Elton John. But to date it does not mention “Lift Off” by Jay-Z and Kanye West (featuring Beyoncé), a song that goes to the Moon and Mars in the same trip, and pleasingly credits Bruno Mars as one of the songwriters.

“Best songs about the Moon that DON’T have the word ‘moon’ in their titles” is the subject of a rewarding Reddit forum. Selections include “Sleeping Satellite” by Tasmin Archer, “Mirrorball” by Elbow, “Just One Of Those Things” by Cole Porter and “Rocket Man” by Elton John. But to date it does not mention “Lift Off” by Jay-Z and Kanye West (featuring Beyoncé), a song that goes to the Moon and Mars in the same trip, and pleasingly credits Bruno Mars as one of the songwriters.

The craziest musical about the moon is Man on the Moon, written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, directed by Warhol Factory icon Paul Morrissey and produced by Warhol in 1975. It follows an astronaut who must save the world after an evil scientist plants a bomb on the Moon, and closed two days after the first reviews.

Neil Armstrong is a fantastic name for an American astronaut.

But Buzz Aldrin’s name goes deeper. His mother was born Marion Gaddys Moon, in the year the Wright Brothers first flew. He got his nickname (now his real name, after a legal switch) when his baby sister called him “buzzer” rather than “brother”. His original name was Edwin. At the time of writing, Mr Aldrin is still alive, aged 94.

The phrase “we can put a man on the Moon but we still don’t know how to [fill in blank]” is a popular parlour game (or should be). The most obvious is clearly “we can get a man to the Moon, but we still don’t understand one hundredth of the workings of the human brain”. (But the human brain can get us to the Moon and back, so the result is a draw.)

We can put a man on the Moon, but we still don’t know how to stop garden squirrels eating our tulips.

The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the Moon. In fact, it is hardly visible from low-earth orbit (beginning at 100 miles). The myth probably arises from the 1930s journalism of Richard Halliburton, who, though a great romantic adventurer of the skies and the seas, once mistook a horse for a camel.

The Moon is made of grabbedy. Some children think cheese, some specifically green cheese, others think paper and some think neon light. But in Renata Adler’s brilliant novel Speedboat, one iconoclastic child says it is made of grabbedy. Certain readers believe the child may have meant gravity, which obviously would have been inaccurate, given the lack of it, but grabbedy seems entirely plausible.

Speedboat also contains a hilarious passage about Nasa’s robotic vehicle Surveyor 1, sent to the Moon in 1966 to test its suitability for a soft landing and to take photos, most of which were of its own feet. Surveyor 1 soon ran out of power, but then woke up again sporadically and sent more photos, also of its feet.

The first thing many British children knew about the Moon was the BBC TV series The Clangers. This was a community of knitted creatures who lived on a Moon-style surface and made whistling noises. The show, which was inspired by the Moon landings, was so missed by the onetime children who now ran TV networks that it was revived in 2015, narrated by Michael Palin (UK) and William Shatner (USA). Of course it was Shatner.

According to the Internet, cannabis “moon rocks” are both “the champagne of the pot world” and “the Rolls-Royce of the pot world”. The rocks are particularly strong, consisting of “different forms of pot combined into a potent nugget and then dipped or sprayed with hash oil”. The nuggets not only look like rocks that may have been found on the Moon, but will also “send you” there. Proceed with caution.

Of all the things our explorations of the Moon have given us, the Teflon coating of pans may seem the most useful on a day-to-day basis. But flip that omelette, because Teflon existed long before the Apollo programme, and the compound, patented by DuPont, was part of the Apollo launches already, coating the sides of several rockets and modules. Velcro, too, was not a Nasa invention, though the agency found it very useful on spacesuits, and Buzz Aldrin used it to affix his Speedmaster around the arm of his suit with an extra-long strap.

Howling at the Moon, a phrase describing the futility of a situation, is nonetheless popular with coyotes, wolves and werewolves. Why do they do it? Unfortunately, common wisdom now suggests they don’t. They do howl, but it is for mating/communication/warning reasons, with the presence of the Moon deemed incidental. Spiritually, an animal howling at the Moon is thought to be summoning ancient deities.

Howl at the Moon is a successful chain of large American bars specialising in duelling pianos and 86oz drinks, one of which is called the Adios Mofo.

The best recent book about the Moon is Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle. We can always trust the Moon, she writes, not just its presence but its brilliance. The question is whether we can trust ourselves with it.

The Golden Record that travelled with both Voyager spacecraft to the solar system in 1977 contained 90 minutes of music, including excerpts from The Magic Flute, Brandenburg Concerto No 2 and The Rite of Spring. But it contained the whole of “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.

It also contained greetings in 55 languages, suggesting that at least one of them might be comprehensible to whatever beings managed to play the disc. The recordings included messages in Russian (“Greetings! I welcome You!”), the Bantu language Nyanja (“How are all you people of other planets?”) and Mandarin Chinese (“We all very much wish to meet you, if you’re free please come and visit”). The Indonesian greeting — “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time” — assumed all sorts of things.

On 18 September 1977, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to take a photo showing both the Moon and the Earth in a single frame. It was launched 16 days after Voyager 2 but, as its trajectory was shorter, it would soon catch up.

In his book Patrick Moore on the Moon (2001), the monocled TV astronomer refused to rule out the presence of “bug-eyed monsters”. He did, however, discount the account of Richard Locke, who, reporting for the New York Sun on John Herschel’s supposed great new telescope in the 1830s, described lunar “bat-men” four-feet tall and covered in glossy red hair.

The brush-heads on the end of brooms used to collect lunar soil look quite like the Apple Vision Pro.

Published in March 2024, a report on “lunar market opportunities” from the analysis company NSR examined existing and emerging orbit and surface possibilities. A list of the many organisations driving sector growth in this field includes Ceres Robotics, the German Aerospace Center, the Goonhilly Earth Station, the Saudi Space Agency and Telespazio.

Philippe Starck is already planning the living space for the Artemis space station, described in the Financial Times as “a womb with quilted walls, studded with colourful LED lights”.

The Moon completes the Earth, and it is never unlovely.