The moon is never what you think it is

Lessons from space travel

I’ve been watching the Apple TV show, For All Mankind, over the last few weeks. It’s an alternate history that imagines the Soviets make it to the moon before the U.S. and then traces the effects of that on the space program and American society in general. For example, when the Soviets put a woman on the moon, NASA is motivated to recruit their own women astronauts, which means there are women in space long before Sally Ride.

If you’re a big alternate history fan, this might not be the show for you. The alternate history is definitely interesting, but not central. For example, John Lennon isn’t assassinated in this timeline, but the Pope is. Ted Kennedy becomes president and pardons Nixon. The Russians never invade Afghanistan, but the U.S. becomes involved in a Cold War standoff with Panama. All of this is in the background as news stories that flash across the screen.

The alternate history is incidental to the real story, which is about NASA. It feels like the alternate history is mostly an excuse to do a fast forward or maybe rewrite the history of the American space program. In this timeline, the U.S. has a ‘settlement’ on the moon by the late 60s. Unfortunately, the settlement is named Jamestown, which feels a like a big refusal to learn from our past mistakes.

The alternate history stuff still raises interesting questions. In this timeline, the Equal Rights Amendment actually passes and we’re led to believe that’s because of women astronauts. Would it have worked like that? Who knows? I love theoretical arguments about history as much as the next person and it’s fun to at least contemplate some of these, especially when for the last twenty years or so it’s felt like we’ve been living in the wrong historical timeline.

For All Mankind isn’t really for hardcore sci-fi fans, either. I mean, it’s from the creators of Battlestar Galactica, so you will get those iconic zoomed shots of random vehicles in space. In this case, it’s the Apollo capsule instead of, you know, Galactica. And that’s definitely cool. Also, people hopping around on the moon, breathing heavily in their spacesuits. But I’m in season two and so far the tech is only as complicated as the existing space shuttle program. So if you like your sci-fi full of new and exciting tech, For All Mankind won’t do it for you.

The show is at its core an exploration of people and relationships, which is something I’m always interested in. The characters are complex and interesting. The plot lines aren’t predictable. The people are allowed room to grow and change. I’ve never had any interest in being an astronaut or going into space, but I’m interested in watching these people as they do those things.

Obviously, in the first season, getting to the moon is a big deal. Some of the characters have been waiting for years to get their moon shot. It’s the ultimate goal at that point. To stand on the surface of the moon and look back at Earth. Going to the moon is imagined as life-changing. A watershed event. The characters imagine that in their lives there will be the period before they got to the moon and the period after they got to the moon.

One of the women astronauts, who starts out as one of the male astronaut’s wife, puts in her time and finally gets to the moon. At first, of course, she’s excited. “It’s so beautiful,” she says. She learns how to fly the little spacecraft thing they use to get around on the moon’s surface. She eats the disgusting scrambled eggs. She bounces along the surface in her spacesuit.

At the point in the timeline when she reaches the moon, there’ s a station that houses something like twenty people. There’s a big mining operation, digging up ice they find in the Shackleton crater on the moon’s south pole. They’re also looking for lithium.

The point is, the moon has become an operation. This woman astronaut can appear on The Johnny Carson Show from the settlement on the moon. It’s all become sort of routine and she becomes, yeah, bored. Bored on the moon.

Still, the moon’s a big deal. She’s a pretty good actress, so you can watch her struggling with her disappointment. This is what she always wanted. Her husband got to the moon. Now it’s her turn. She worked hard for this. There were many obstacles to overcome, including people’s tendency to see her as a joke—the astronaut’s wife turned astronaut.

At one point, she’s out in her spacesuit, jumping around on the surface of the moon, imagining a conversation with an astronaut who died and was buried on the moon (yes, dead bodies on the moon in this timeline). She turns around and takes in the gray landscape. “The thing about the moon is,” she says, “It’s just so empty.”

In other words, the moon is never what you think it is.

Photo by Josh Miller on Unsplash

Ain’t that the truth, as well as being some great television writing. Because we all have our moon, don’t we? That thing we’re working so hard for or waiting so long for. That line we’re waiting to cross. That greener grass. That moment when everything will come together and we will be happy and know what it was all about in the first place. We will be complete. Whole. Finished.

We will be on the moon. Only the moon will be so empty.

I’ve been to so many moons in my lifetime. When I was a high school student I believed that traveling the world would make me happy. It was what I was meant to do. I didn’t belong in the small town where I grew up. I was too big for that place. Once I got out into the world, my life would really begin.

After high school, my parents kindly footed the bill for a plane ticket to England, where I spent two weeks with my best friend, who’d been an exchange student my junior year of high school. We saw all the sights in London. We went to the Isle of Wight and Stonehenge and Winchester Cathedral. I stood on the beach in Wales and I went to a pub and had my first snakebite (a dangerous drink). I ate marmite and English sausages that were so disgusting I still feel a little nauseous even thinking about them all these years later.

I saw the world or at least one small corner of it. What I remember is how traveling was not at all what I expected it would be. I was let down. I went to the moon and it was empty. I did not become a different person. Whatever joy or transformation or completion I expected to happen didn’t arrive. I lost ten pounds because I found the food so gross.¹ That was the only change to me as a person as far as I could tell.

And then I went home, because the other thing about the moon is that you can’t stay there forever (well, unless you’re that dead guy who’s buried there).

Traveling was the first of so many moons for me. I would be happier when I went away to college and, in that case, I actually was. But then I graduated. I’d be happier when I finished my Ph.D., only right after that, I started my first job and that might have been even worse. I’d be happier when I left that job and took a new one. I’d be happy when I was in a relationship. But then I’d be even happier when we could skip through the first part of the relationship and get right to the lying on the couch together part (okay, that is objectively a pretty good part of any relationship).

It's not that some of the things didn’t make me happy. They did. But a lot of that happiness was fleeting. It ended. Or, I got used to it. The moon became boring.

And sometimes the moon was just empty. Some of things I thought would make me happy did not.

Either way, even after I traveled all the way to the moon, I was still mostly me and often, that was part of the problem. As the saying goes, “Wherever you go, there you are.” That includes the moon.

Of course, you probably know the lesson here. The moon isn’t going to solve all your problems. The moon has enough on its plate. Deal with your own shit. Traveling does make me happy now, but that’s because I did some work. I adjusted my expectations. I ended up going some really cool places.

Also, you can really only enjoy the moon if your feet are firmly on the ground. As in, we can only enjoy anything in the present moment. We can spend our lives imagining what it might be like to get to the moon, but we’ll miss a lot along the way. The woman astronaut discovers that she misses her sons and her bed and food that isn’t disgusting scrambled eggs. Which is lovely, but what else about the moon is she missing in that moment? We can’t spend our lives fast-forwarding and rewinding. This moment is all we’ve got.

Yes, the moon is never what you think it is. The moon is empty. But also, the moon is ever-present. The moon is with us, every day, on the morning horizon like a ghost in the sky or in the dead of night like a wide-open eye watching over us. That moon is exactly what we think it is. That moon is beautiful.

1. This trip would have been in 1996, which was sort of before the culinary revolution in England. So I can say that at that point, English food was pretty gross. Also, my friend was a college student and could not afford to eat out much, so we survived on sandwiches made of brown bread, butter and cucumbers, because this is what the English consider a sandwich. What. The. Hell. On my second trip to England, about ten years later, I had some of the best meals of my life.