ON 7 December, China launched a mission to carry a lander and rover to the surface of the moon. On the eve of the half-centenary of Apollo 11’s moon landing and Neil Armstrong’s famous fluffed line about a small step for a man, the Chinese moonshot, called Chang’e 4, may be an indication of where mastery of space – not to mention Earth – is shifting.
The Apollo missions asserted US dominance at the height of the cold war, which is why Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the US flag in the Sea of Tranquility. But going to the moon was not just a reassertion of supremacy after the humiliation of the Soviet Union launching the first satellite, Sputnik 1, and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completing the first Earth orbit. It also upheld the manifest destiny of Americans to venture into the unknown in search of opportunity.
Neither was the Soviet space programme just a flexing of military muscle. “There was an expectation after the second world war that space was just around the corner,” says Doug Millard, deputy keeper of technologies and engineering at London’s Science Museum. “There was a feeling of positivism and progress, that technology would deliver and solve everything.”
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Since the beginning of the Soviet state, space travel has been associated with utopianism, exemplified by 19th-century visionary Nikolai Fedorov and his colleague Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The latter’s drawings of spacecraft, cosmonauts and orbital space stations in the 1930s look like preparatory sketches both for Apollo and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the US, going to the moon was all about rugged, pragmatic individualism; for the Soviets, it was a parable for their communal social philosophy.
“For the US, going to the moon was all about rugged, pragmatic individualism”
This enactment of national myth is apparent in the Chinese moon programme. Chang’e is the name of a goddess who flew to the moon after she drank an elixir of immortality to stop her husband’s enemy from stealing it: a story of heroic and dutiful self-sacrifice that underlies China’s Moon Festival in the autumn. In the era of Chairman Mao Zedong, such stories were ridiculed as remnants of decadent imperialism, but more recently the government has revived legends and historical figures such as Confucius to mobilise nationalist sentiment.
Witness the way the mariner Zheng He of the early Ming dynasty has been portrayed as a benign envoy of Chinese culture, now linked to the “soft power” that an expansionist China is extending to its neighbours.
“Under Xi Jinping, there’s a longer-term plan of exerting Chinese power on a global stage,” says Millard – and the aspirations in space are a part of that.
The Indian space agency ISRO launched its first lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1, in 2008, and a Mars orbiter in 2013. “I’d say that space is very symbolic of national pride there,” says Mark McCaughrean at the European Space Agency. Space also acts as an eye-catching advertisement for technical prowess. “ISRO has a commercial arm, and their Mars mission was meant to show that Indian expertise could deliver,” says Millard.
What, then, of Europe? The European dream – what remains of it – has always been about cooperation, explicitly renouncing the nationalism that wrought such destruction in the 20th century. “The way our team developed and managed the outreach campaign for the Rosetta mission [to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014] and the way it was perceived worldwide was perhaps representative of a more European feel: no flags being waved, allowing everyone to be involved,” says McCaughrean.
Can that kind of egalitarianism deliver enough inspiration, before dissolving into bureaucracy? Right now, that is the question testing European institutions as a whole.
Nations do not lightly undertake moon missions, yet what is there to gain from them? Sure, there is interest in understanding the moon and its origins – but plans for human space flight to our satellite have never really been about science. Space missions generally, and moonshots in particular, enact and reflect the stories nations tell themselves.
This article appeared in print under the headline “A moon for all nations”
