Artemis II Through a Child’s Eyes
My eleven-year-old is daydreaming about the Moon. Thinking of what stands behind the new flyby, I first wanted to say: “screw the Moon”. But I quickly found myself drawn into the same orbit, quietly following his attention. To share in that excitement is not mere indulgence; it is a small suspension of the closures that accumulate with age. In his fascination, the world remains provisionally open, its limits not yet naturalized, its horizons not yet reduced to administrative or economic feasibility. To accompany him there is not to shield him from reality, but to preserve, within it, a space where other scales of thought and desire can still be rehearsed. I watch him, and in doing so, I am reminded that the world is not yet fully fixed; it can still be imagined differently, held open a little longer, if only from where he stands, before it closes again.
One can, as Brecht insisted in another context, still speak of beauty amid injustice, but only by striking the dissonant note. The rocket rises, its brightness briefly overwhelming what persists below; the world remains out of joint. The sentiment that “we are all Earthlings” has a certain resonance when viewed from orbit, but it leaves intact the distribution of who is housed, who is protected, and who is left to absorb the shocks – of war, displacement, and an increasingly volatile climate. Many remain exposed. Most always have.
And yet, if he is captivated by Artemis II, this is not something to be corrected by an early introduction to astronomical budgets, geopolitics, and shady corporate agendas. The prospect of space exploration enlarges the field of the imaginable; it continues to project humanity as a single, if abstract, collective. Against a background of utter fragmentation and managed scarcity, this projection carries a utopian charge that exerts a stubborn pull. It offers, however briefly, a standpoint from which identification can exceed borders and circumstances, as if, for a moment, they might be set aside, returning us to Earth under a different description: not as a patchwork of jurisdictions and control, but as a shared and finite habitat, turning slowly in the dark.
As we watch the Moon-bound capsule leave Earth behind,
I do not speak to him of the interests that converge on the “peaceful” use of
outer space, nor of the familiar actors who debate the extension of property
relations beyond the atmosphere. Nor do I pair, alongside the spectacular views,
the catalogue of terrestrial emergencies and catastrophes that define the
present – fires,
floods, and the slow violence of unaffordable housing – all of which form the persistent
background of adult knowledge and contrast sharply with the pseudo-urgency of
revisiting our natural satellite.
Even as we marvel at the mission’s planetary sweep, it remains embedded in political economy. It presupposes (and demonstrates) the existence of extraordinary capacities: vast resources, accumulated knowledge, coordinated institutions, and long planning horizons. “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of”, said one of the astronauts. The issue, however, is not whether large-scale action is within human reach, but under what conditions, and to what ends, it is undertaken.
The task is
not to oppose wonder with critique, nor to sequester critique in order to
preserve wonder. Wonder opens the world; it marks the sense that what exists is
not exhaustive of what could exist. But left to itself, that impulse is easily
folded back into narratives that celebrate capacity while leaving its
distribution untouched. If the coordination and ambition required to send
humans around the Moon and safely bring them back are clearly within our reach,
why are they applied so selectively?
Wonder – what Plato and Aristotle name thaumazein – need not be an escape from reality. It is the threshold of a more exacting engagement with it. I hope my eleven-year-old will continue to look at the Moon with the same openness, holding onto that interruption, even as he begins to see the world’s uneven ground beneath it.
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