Jen Gerson: A love letter to the moon
We must continue to do the stupid thing.
By: Jen Gerson
I’m not The Line’s resident space dork; and, yet, I, like everyone likely reading this piece, watched the launch of Artemis II last night, enraptured and hopeful for a successful slingshot around the moon.
My son watched with me, he counted down from 10, and he jumped up when the rockets lit up, throwing four astronauts in a tin can into space.
This stuff is cool on its own merit, but it hits us all somewhere a little deeper than mere wonder at the extraordinary mechanics.
Watching a manned rocket launch is the barest little window-crack opening into a distant future. It’s a monumental effort to throw a fine fishing line into the darkness, hoping against hope that some great destiny is on the other side just waiting for us to tug at it.
By all rational accounts space travel is dumb. It’s an extraordinarily expensive use of human capital and time and resources to reach into nothingness and expanse. We all love pictures of stars and planets and nebulae, but we may never glean much of real material value from these investments in our own lifetimes. Or our great-grandchildren’s lifetimes.
There may be nothing but lifeless rock and death beyond our own ecosystem; no other place we will ever call home.
In fact, from where we sit today, that’s probably true.
Yet we do this stupid thing anyway. We must do the stupid thing anyway.
And that’s because — in addition to the fact that we can never know what we don’t know until we know it — if humanity is to survive indefinitely, if we are to place bets on our own immortality, the chips must be laid somewhere.
They are laid in the now; with my family, gathered around the computer, getting excited about what must one day be considered primitive explosions breaking orbit. We must see ourselves as a generational project. Spaceships are our most tangible reminder of this, the really big picture. All any of us can do in the present moment is to work for the future good.
And it must be a good that we, in our limited and mortal ways, can see only in shadows and glimpses. To engage in the audacious project of our own survival requires respect not only for the traditions and goals that brought us here, but also faith; a trust in the value of ourselves to keep going, and in future generations to see our stupidity and our optimism and add to it. The current moment, good and bad, it all continues. Life carries forward.
A spaceship launch is hope.
That hope continues even if the mission itself happens to fail, just as long as we do not stop.
In those moments, I’m also reminded of something else. Every single one of us is crucial to the ridiculous ongoing experiment of our absurd species.
I don’t mean to engage in stolen valour here. The tens of thousands of individuals who spent years of their lives designing and building a goddamn rocketship to the moon — not to mention the astronauts (including a Canadian!) who man the mission — are owed all the credit we can heap on them.
But those people do not exist in a vacuum.
They exist in a complicated human society, one that dares to collectively imagine itself as greater than it is; it elects leaders that then appropriate funding for those ambitions. Even the critics of programs like NASA play a function in a civilization that allows such an institution to exist at all.
Rocket launches are America at its best, and perhaps now more than usual, we need to remind ourselves that this best still exists. Perhaps especially on the same night we sat fearing the President would announce that NATO was over and the world was breaking. (He didn’t, and I guess it’s not for now.)
And regardless of what nation we belong to, whether we’re accountants, butlers, or mothers, every single one of us carries that thin thread of life forward. We all take part in the project. We all have a place. Some of the big roles may be assigned to individual players, but the destiny of humanity is shared. (Whether we like it or not.)
So, we can all be moved together in these moments. We can all imagine what great-great-great grandchildren who have long forgotten our own names might think while watching archival footage of the Artemis II launch. What even greater world might they achieve. What more fanciful ambitions might be open to them. Maybe they will say that this was the moment we started to get our priorities right and our acts together. Maybe things will get better.
Maybe Artemis II, absurd and wasteful, is neither. Who knows how my son will metabolize the video stream of this really cool rocket; I cannot say who he may come to be for witnessing it.
Our craziest aspirations are the way we send our love to the children too far distant for us to see or know.
The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today. Please note: a donation is not a subscription, and will not grant access to paywalled content. It’s just a way of thanking us for what we do. If you’re looking to subscribe and get full access, it’s that other blue button!
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter.Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com
Yes, nothing says “hope” like a rocket launch, I totally agree.
I was at my granddaughters birthday party during the launch. I had it streaming on my phone and when the launch countdown began, all the adults huddled around my wee screen to watch. The kids were momentarily interested but quickly ran off to do 5 year old birthday stuff.
I must admit, my heart pounded as the rocket shone against the eggshell blue sky, and conversation turned to “where were you when the Challenger blew up…?” Yikes. And still… the thrill of exploration, the proof we can still do big things, the science that is happening on this trip… the composition of the crew… they all remind me of the feeling in my body of the good days we’ve had… so different from the constant dread I’ve felt since… well… let’s say the last five years as we lurch from one bad thing to the next.
I appreciate this reminder that if we work together, we can still do big things. Good things. And be hopeful.
Thanks for your piece. And for creating good memories with your son.
I wrote my first reply before I remembered Walter Lippman’s tribute to Amelia Earhart, written just a few days after she disappeared on her way to Johnston Island toward what would have been the end of her round-the-world flight. I print it here because Lippman had a far greater command of the language than I ever will.
"The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky."