Why We Should Explore Space

It makes me feel my age to type that Sebastian Milbank writes:

Over 50 years ago, the first manned mission to the moon took its crew further beyond our planet than any people in history. For 30 unsettling minutes, they were out of contact with the earth, passing over a stark and silent landscape that had never been seen by the naked eye.

As contact resumed, an extraordinary vision presented itself to the astronauts — the earth rising like the sun over the lunar horizon, blazing with life and light. It was Christmas Eve, in 1968, and thousands of young men — and civilians — were dying in the war in Vietnam. Yet to the lonely souls caught in the void of space, it appeared as a “grand oasis”. Speaking to an audience of millions, they read the first verses of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth … ”.

After a very long hiatus, humans orbited the moon again. The Artemis II mission blasted off on a clear April evening, hurling its passengers yet further than Apollo 8, as they passed 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. On Easter Day 2026 crewman Victor Glover, who teaches Sunday school in his spare time, spoke of “the beauty of creation” and the unity of the human race.

There is something about space flight, especially in its most ambitious forms, which sparks religious awe. Indeed, for the generally pretty secular scientific community, space is something of a theological proxy, offering, in fantasy or speculation, the prospect of meeting transcendently wise non-human beings, the mysteries of creation and apocalypse and pilgrimage to the promised land.

Just like the wondering and weary souls gazing at the “earthrise” in 1968, the humanity of 2026 is in desperate need of a message of hope. But for all its fleeting majesty and genius, is Artemis II a cause for real optimism or the ultimate escapism? Is it easier to look up at the moon than it is to read about Gaza, Iran, Sudan or a million other miseries, global and local?

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Caught in the parallels of the moment, it is worth remembering the vast gulf of time that separates Apollo and Artemis. Despite being into middle age, not one of the Artemis astronauts was alive when the last moon mission flew in 1972. After the initial flurry of excitement, the realities of a new age shouldered aside the hopes of interstellar exploration. Opponents had long branded it a “moondoggle”. The same year the first orbit of the moon was completed, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and a growing mood of violence, pessimism and division seized America.

Gil Scott-Heron, a songwriter and poet of the time, lyricised, “A rat done bit my sister Nell / With Whitey on the moon / Her face and arms began to swell / And Whitey’s on the moon.” Cynicism set in on left and right alike, crime exploded and an epidemic of domestic terrorism saw 50 to 60 bombings a year by the mid-1970s. The oil shock slowed the roaring growth of the 1960s, and trust in shared institutions gave way to an age of deconstruction and suspicion of authority.

In purely technical terms, NASA was fully prepared to mount a mission to Mars by 1982. Project Rover had developed the technology to build nuclear-powered rockets twice as efficient as chemical equivalents. It was not to be. The space programme was gutted by Nixon, and, despite successes such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, manned space exploration itself was abandoned as too expensive to justify.

Plans to go back to the moon have been subject to false starts ever since, the latest of which was the Constellation program under President Bush in the 2000s, subsequently cancelled by President Obama. Artemis itself rests on the slenderest of political threads, signed off by President Trump, who was eager to add a moon mission to swell his boundless ego but who has cut the rest of NASA’s budget aggressively.

Now as then, large-scale scientific projects without immediate practical applications are vulnerable to partisans of left and right. Progressives see “whitey on the moon” as the poor go hungry, not to mention the fact that they are now counting the carbon emissions too, whilst the contemporary right sees it as wasteful big government largesse.

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It seems strange to label something as futuristic as space exploration old-fashioned, but, looked at culturally, it is distinctively retro. We are now sceptical of grand projects and totalising worldviews, obsessed with individual identity and resolutely utilitarian and commercial in our habits of thought. The extraordinary effort of Apollo, which employed over 400,000 people and today’s equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars of state spending, was in a sense the twilight achievement of a post-war consensus, when right and left alike believed in the power of collective action, state planning, science and engineering to positively shape human destiny.

This was also the last period of monumental architecture, grand urban planning and lavish international expositions like the Festival of Britain or the phenomenally successful 1970 Osaka International Expo entitled “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”. At a certain point, Western societies started asking “Why?” instead of “Why not?”. An individualist and egalitarian culture became suspicious of extravagance, whether public or private.

When it comes to manned space flight, the immediate short-term benefits are limited and fall far short of the massive costs in resources, capital and labour. It does little for economic growth and less for public welfare. Even the strongest argument in its arsenal — scientific discovery — can arguably be achieved more efficiently, and certainly more cheaply, by robots and automated systems.

Spiritually, going to the moon has more in common with the building of the great gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe than it does the construction of an oil rig or an aeroplane. Like the gothic cathedral, it is an extraordinary work of engineering and collective human genius, and, like the cathedral, it escapes cost-benefit analysis. It is the answer not to “Why”, but to “Why not?” We have vast resources, huge surpluses of labour, creativity, capital and energy, unprecedented comforts and luxuries. Why not do something extraordinary, something that lifts the human spirit, something that serves not ourselves but our distant descendants?

The benefits and lessons of Apollo are being realised today, decades onwards, as are the costs and dangers of abandoning the adventurous and heroic spirit of shared endeavour that animated it. Much of the digital technological mastery that we take for granted was dreamed up in big government laboratories at the height of the Cold War. Not the least element of this was Apollo and the space program itself, which were crucial to spurring the development of miniaturised computers and semiconductors — the building blocks of today’s digital revolution.

The dangerous but glamorous work of putting men and women into space attracted brilliant young minds and captured the imagination of a generation. The ground team that launched Apollo was an average of 28 years old. The civilisation that reached out to the stars was a younger, braver, more ambitious and more energetic culture than our own aging, safety-obsessed society.

Such a society is notably worse at providing what younger people need, both materially and spiritually. Artemis II, amongst other things, is a testament to what sort of opportunities, despite everything, America can offer its citizens when it invests in shared endeavour. Both the mission commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover are former college athletes and veterans of the US army. College sports and military service have long been reliable ladders of social mobility, offering young men and women both the material nurture of education, housing and pay, but, just as importantly, the prospects of heroism, fame and adventure. How far can you go if you have some wits and athleticism and apply yourself? In America, today, the answer to that question is the moon.

It’s a lesson Britain, which recently folded its independent space agency into another government department, might do well to learn. As extraordinary as the opportunity to go into space may be for the few who are lucky enough to get it, the most important element of manned space flight is its ability to inspire. This happens directly, by pushing at the limits of science and engineering, but just as significant is the indirect sparking of young imaginations, opening up pathways into science, medicine, engineering and technology.

If we only ask how much the Artemis II mission cost or even just limit ourselves to what data was retrieved, we will have asked the wrong questions. What has kept us from going back to the moon for so long, and what is likely to hold us back from testing the limits of science in future?

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Ironically for a question of material progress, the answer may be theological in nature. Peter Thiel has puzzled over why we have raced ahead in the world of “bits” — computing, software, communications — whilst stagnating in the realm of “atoms” — energy, transport, material science. The answer could be contained in the question. We have fixated on the virtual over the physical. The world’s fair was abandoned in large part because television could bring spectacle to the screens of every household much more cheaply than giant global gatherings. Mastering data has allowed us to speed things along via perpetual “optimisation” rather than faster vehicles or more powerful engines.

This privileging of simulacra over substance may have its origins in materialism itself. According to the leading materialist philosophers like Daniel Dennett, human consciousness itself is virtual — our apparent experience of having a mind is an “epiphenomenon”, a ghost in the machine with no ability to affect material causation. Why labour to build paradise on earth when you can simply simulate it?

Likewise, the apparent technological mastery of information presents another dangerous lure away from the difficult and lengthy business of real innovation. Why try and grow the pie if you can perfectly allocate the portions? “Just in time” production is one of the great fruits of the digital revolution, seamlessly integrating economic activity across continents with astonishing speed. There are real benefits to such systems, but the terrible risk is that they create a collective worship of efficiency and a narcissistic cult of self-optimisation. Rather than taking transformative risks, society attempts to calculate its way to a Benthamite summum bonum. 

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For all the achievements and vitality of post-war society, it was its very materialistic worship of scientific and social engineering that ultimately undid its highest material achievement and sparked the demise of space flight.

If all that matters is human pain and pleasure and our fleeting peace and comfort here on Earth, there really is no need to explore the cosmos, or to look beyond our immediate collective self-interest. Like the medieval masons of old, the architects of astrological exploration must find ways to root risky endeavour in a transcendent order.

Space exploration, if we dare to pursue it, will someday help lead to unimaginable breakthroughs and opportunities. But the great chance and opportunity it offers to us today is not economic growth or the relief of worldly suffering. It is the chance to explore the majesty of creation in the fear and trembling of naked flesh — an infinite field of adventure in which to test our humanity.

Ours is an improbably dominant species. Far from having been seen off by something much bigger, and endowed with fangs, or claws, or talons, or venom, or what have you, we alone have been to the Moon. Within two generations of that, though, we are afraid of words. Either we go to back to the Moon, and then to Mars and beyond, or we accept that we have entered our decline, the endpoint of which could only be extinction. Space is being both privatised and militarised, a very common combination but always a lethal one, and that by the country that does not recognise it as a common resource for all humanity. There needs to be a return to President Eisenhower’s proposal, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 22 September 1960, for the principles of the Antarctic Treaty to be extended to Outer Space.

If God had not intended us to be a spacefaring species, then He would never have put anything up there for us to find. People who think that these missions impoverish anyone, even as an initial outlay, do not understand how the money supply works. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, Britain has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect.

Why, though, spend that currency on this? Welcome to the Anthropocene, that is why. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. Vladimir Vernadsky and Krafft Ehricke will yet have their day. They may be having it now.

“To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man,” said Leon Trotsky. “Dominion,” says the God of the Bible. Dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. Dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. And dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way. That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”.