Artemis II is a fiery reminder of our eternal fascination with the moon

Tranquillity, serenity: the names we have given to the “seas” of the moon reflect a general view that it is a kind of quiet, calming companion that has been with us for as long as we know. But the relationship began in violence and fire: according to the prevailing theory, the moon was formed around 4.5 billion years ago, when a huge planet known as Theia smashed into the Early Earth, tore out a piece of it, and flung it off into space, but just close enough to stay in our orbit.

We’ve been circling each other ever since. As the Earth cooled, became habitable and then inhabited, and then gave rise to vast civilisations, they kept looking up. The moon seemed made as a symbol, and so it became.

So we started talking. The moon as god (the Artemis mission takes its name from the Greek lunar goddess, but there are examples in just about every culture). The moon as a calendar (there is some speculation that the first calendars were used to track both the Moon and menstrual cycles, in part because of their uncanny alignment). The moon as literary symbol (of both change and constancy, of both distance and proximity). The moon as maddening (as visible in “lunacy”).

Beautiful conversations, romantic always and then eventually with a capital R. We’ve been talking about and to the moon for as long as we’ve been talking, but it was in the 19th century and Romanticism that today’s lunar view was really formed. Visually in Blake (“I want! I want!”), in Samuel Palmer (where it rises, eerie and sublime, comforting and frightening), and as the swirling lunatic centrepiece of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In literature, too: Keats, who in Endymion has the moon goddess falling in love with a human, close and distant at the same time. Enough Romantic words about the moon that Byron was already able to use it ironically.

Through the 19th century, we thought people might live there; unthinkable that it might really be as quiet as it seemed. (The possibility of life on the Moon is now best remembered in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, in which a newspaper claimed astronomer John Herschel had seen hybrids of men and bats on its surface; but his father, William Herschel, really did think that he had spotted towns there.) But the observations and visits we have done since have only served to prove just how empty the moon is: it is airless, lifeless, soundless.

The 19th century might have built our view of the moon, but the 20th century brought the technology to touch as well as see it. Literature brought the idea that we might go there, even live there. And the space race made that idea real.

One hundred and fifty years after Endymion, we could finally try to close the gap. In 1968, humanity finally touched the moon; Blake’s wanter had climbed up the ladder. And then, all of a sudden, more silence: the Apollo 17 mission of 1972 was the last time we made it, and we no longer really have the power to get back. Our technological hubris was laid bare, and the gap between our constant companion and us opened back up again, if it ever really closed.

But now we’re trying again. Nasa hopes that the Artemis II mission, launched this week, will be the beginning of a new relationship with the moon: we’re only flying around it this time, but in a couple of years, it hopes to touch down, and from there build more permanent settlements. It is a new space race, and one again defined by polarities: exploration and expropriation have always come together, and space agencies around the world finally feel that we might be able to make the moon our own. Nobody really knows if we will, or if we should.

We might have assumed that visiting the moon would diminish some of this mystery, what Keats called “unweaving the rainbow.” Or that the mystery would be too much for us to cope with, and that getting too close would destroy us, like a cold Icarus.

Neither. The moon and its mysteries may be inhospitable, but they are not unwelcoming. Look at those bizarre pictures of astronauts bouncing across its surface, and you see a world just strange enough to tear us apart, but just familiar enough to save us.

It is a kind of conversation of its own. Us doing our best, with spacesuits and vast rockets, to meet it. The moon doing its best, in its mute mystery, to give us something in return.

Wolves howl; we build. The Artemis mission is a flaming, fiery question, shouted at the thing we’ve been talking to for aeons. Time to listen.