The following essay is being published in conjunction with the “(In)hospitable Space Conference” which explores the human dimensions of space exploration and is cosponsored between the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, and the European Astrobiology Institute.
Last year marked fifty-three years since humans had viewed Earth from the Moon. This year marked our species’ return to its night sky companion. In the age of NASA’s Artemis program, what are people thinking and feeling about our species’ return to the Moon and beyond?
In the United States, elected officeholders pass legislation, issue executive orders, and set the trajectory for human activities on the Moon and beyond, all of which they justify as advancing purported national interests. However, the public remains largely absent from conversations about space exploration. To date, public perceptions of American lunar ambitions are largely limited to sporadic polling in brief surveys. Although important, polling is characterized by crude measures with little nuance, detail, or follow-up. Often, myriad claims regarding public perspectives of space exploration are anecdotal, rather than empirical.
To more thoroughly explore contemporary views, we included lunar ambitions as one component of a larger study on the human future. We conducted research interviews with 100 participants across all 50 states and Washington, DC. Here, we summarize initial qualitative results of public perceptions about human activity on the Moon.
On July 20th, 1969, about ninety-four percent of American television-viewing households watched live coverage of the Apollo 11 crew visiting the Moon. An estimated 650 million people worldwide listened to Neil Armstrong’s distant, crackling voice as he sank his boots into lunar regolith. That summer the United States achieved a stated goal of beating the Soviets in the Cold War race to the Moon.
People retrospectively recall that Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind,” yet at the time, this lunar mission did not enjoy overwhelming public support. Despite the considerable number of people who tuned in to the historic moonwalk, most Americans did not think the Apollo program was worth the expense. The only time that more than fifty percent thought Moonshot was worth the taxpayer funds was when they watched Armstrong take his lunar stroll. Even then, support sat at a mere fifty-three percent. In the years leading up to Apollo 11 and those that followed, the public was otherwise immersed in watershed domestic and international events – the struggle for civil rights, the War on Poverty, the threat of nuclear war, and the Vietnam War – that seemed more immediately pressing than sending humans to the Moon. Amid lackluster public perception, in December 1972 the Apollo 17 crew members became the last to set foot on the lunar surface.
A half-century later, locked in a new space race with China, the United States returned to lunar orbit. At 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1, 2026, NASA launched its Artemis II mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida beside the Atlantic Ocean. Sitting atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Lockheed Martin was the Orion spacecraft, occupied by astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. After a successful lunar flyby of record-breaking distance, the capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego at 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10, 2026. This technical feat opens the path for the Artemis IV mission to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
Eighteen million Americans watched livestream coverage of the Artemis II launch. Twenty-seven million viewed the splashdown. Unlike the Apollo missions, social media enabled more immediate and personal engagement with the crew and mission. Aside from superficial counts of views, likes, and shares, we know little of what the public actually thinks about contemporary lunar ambitions.
To more thoroughly explore public perspectives, between April 2023 and December 2025, we enrolled 100 adults across all 50 states and Washington, DC in a research study. Participants completed a pre-interview demographic form, semi-structured interview, and post-interview survey. Participant demographics approximated national averages in age (40 years [19-80 years]; U.S.=39 years), gender (Female=48; Male=46; Other=6), education (Bachelor’s or higher=49; U.S.=44.5%), median household income ($75,000 [$0-200,000]; U.S.=$80,610), and race (White Alone=66; U.S.=61%). Occupation and political preference varied widely (e.g., truck driver, nurse, visual artist, entertainer, bartender, poet, chef, electrician, etc.; Right=27; Moderate=28; Left=32; Other=13). Participants represented backgrounds of, in no particular order, Baha’i, atheist, spiritual but not religious, Buddhist, mystic, Jewish, agnostic, Hindu, Muslim, and diversely Christian, from Catholic to Latter-Day Saint to many Protestant denominations.
For the present study, we analyzed responses to questions in the interview about the Moon. Conversations covered views about humans returning to the Moon, how people should treat the Moon, mining the Moon, governmental or corporate ownership or property claims on the Moon, and who should regulate human activity on the Moon. We asked follow-up questions as appropriate.
Employing reflexive thematic analysis of interview transcripts,[v] we generated five major themes: 1) Instrumental and Intrinsic Value (how participants consider the Moon’s value, especially but not exclusively its utility for humanity, 2) Cosmic Worldviews (participants’ judgments of humanity’s purview beyond Earth and its regulation), 3) Deliberations and Uncertainties (demonstrates the efforts of participants to deliberate human activities on the Moon by considering potential outcomes, perceiving information needs, and acknowledging limitations in their ability to construct a response), 4) Human Nature Quandary (how participants constructed their views of human activities on the Moon and beyond by reflecting on human nature), and 5) “Leave the Moon to be the Moon” (how participants construct the meaning of lunar integrity).
Participants spoke of the Moon in terms of instrumental and intrinsic value, many emphasizing scientific value, as well as pondering potential benefits for humans on Earth. Possible benefits included speculation about material utility (e.g., resources) and idealistic possibilities (e.g., unifying humanity). When considering human activities, they commonly referred to the importance of the Moon to Earth’s functioning (e.g., tides) or beauty in the night sky. For many, its distinctiveness became evident when participants considered the difference in mining the Moon versus mining asteroids, where the latter were described as merely “floating rocks,” though participants feared accidental redirection toward Earth. As an Alabama participant shared, there is “not a lot of Moon to go around. The Moon’s kind of important, the mass of it…I don’t want to mess with– asteroids I don’t care about.”
Participants diverged in thinking about the authority that humans do, or do not, have over extraplanetary bodies. Largely in the context of possible land ownership, some spoke of the intrinsic value of the Moon, aligning with the Moon Agreement (e.g., “it belongs to the Universe”, “it’s its own thing”, and that it is “hubris, to really think you can own something like that”). Others described the Moon as a public good, commons, or “human endowment” from which all should benefit and in posterity. A less frequent view was that the Moon was perhaps up for grabs just like land on Earth once became private property. Some participants made specific references to a “Western frontier” era in the United States. Participants pronouncedly described the importance of representation in the regulation of lunar activities. A Kansas participant stated it “really should be a joint collaboration, because it’s something that affects literally everyone on Earth.”
When describing or deliberating their perspectives, participants raised many questions (e.g., purpose, motive, details on mining), and contingencies (e.g., “As long as it’s [mining] done ethically and consciously”, “it [return to Moon] would be nice…but we need to take care of this planet first.” Many reflected on human qualities, characteristics, and motives. Some of these were benign or positive. For instance, a Texas participant reflected on how humans are explorers, saying “it’s just human nature to reach out, explore and keep exploring the curiosity of man.” Most, however, were negative. Participants commonly referenced self-enrichment, domination, conflict, exploitation, and destruction. Findings illuminated participant unease over the possibility (or inevitability) to repeat mistakes of terrestrial-based environmental destruction and to export existing problems off-Earth.
Participants cared about how humans will interact with the Moon, often with strong sentiments of respect and gentle conduct. Many stated that we should treat it “better than Earth”. Several participants grounded their position on how humans should act on the Moon by citing expectations for how people treat protected areas on our planet. One participant said, it’s “like backpacking in, like, the Boundary Waters in Minnesota… you can’t leave anything behind, right?” Others spoke of reverence. A Missouri participant shared that the Moon is “almost sacred, like we don’t take rocks back home…keep it as intact and untouched as possible, while still observing it and respecting its beauty and place in our world.” Often, participants expressed concerns about potential negative repercussions or unintended consequences as a result of human actions and advised that we leave the Moon alone. As a Rhode Island participant said, “look at all the things that we haven’t understood, we didn’t even know there were good bacteria not that long ago. So, I think the more you mess with stuff you don’t understand…the worse off we’re going to be.” A number of participants even expressed concern over accidentally “blowing up” the Moon.
Moreover, a participant from Wisconsin shared, “…we should just leave the moon to be the moon.” This deceptively simple statement encapsulates a range of perspectives on how participants thought humanity should interact with the Moon, and the degree of lunar integrity that participants desire. Whether they wished for the Moon to be completely left alone, to become a launchpad for future exploration, or to be a site for scientific discovery or technological development, they do not want to risk harming the Moon. Two participant quotes demonstrate this dynamic thinking well. One Texas participant spoke to lunar integrity in terms of humanity’s conceptual relationship with the Moon: “…if you could do it [mining] without changing what the Moon means to the Earth, you know, like, if you can look through a telescope and still see the same old Moon, I think that’d be okay.” A Nebraska participant said, “if they break the moon and it doesn’t do the right things, and then there’s tidal waves here, I’m going to be mad.”
Our participants’ views were akin to the lunar surface itself. From within the Earth’s atmosphere, the Moon might appear monochromatic to us, yet during the Artemis II lunar flyby on April 6, 2026, astronaut Jeremy Hansen described a varied color palette:
we have obviously the dark and the light gray and then we talked about naming some colors…Aristarchus… that had greenish hues to me. It was very unique… And then I see a lot of these what I would call brownish hue areas. There’s a number of them… …I see those same brownish hues west of Orientale.
Ninety-four percent of Americans think that NASA and the United States Space program should continue, with approximately seven in ten saying that it is “essential for the U.S. to be a leader in space exploration.” But polling data also tells us that in 2023, only twelve percent of the public thought that sending astronauts to the Moon was a top priority for NASA. Artemis II images may have impressed many, but as the crew traveled to their destination, only thirty-three percent of Americans polled thought that landing astronauts on the Moon was “Extremely Important” or “Very Important.” Past studies show that support drops when the phrase “spending billions of dollars” is included in survey questions.
Yet beyond surface statistics in dark and light gray, our study suggests that humans hold more complicated perspectives about human interactions with the Moon. Views on lunar activities are not as straightforward as whether humans should explore or not. Similar to scientific lunar exploration, a closer examination of societal views shows multidimensional human perspectives. Future research, including that which we intend to do, must represent this complexity. Thinking deeply about what happens after memorable and milestone moments of humans standing upon new terrains matters to our species. Our participants remind us that the public cares about more than rocket launches and beautiful images, and that they should be consulted in conversations about what forking paths their own species might walk beyond our home planet.
Image courtesy of NASA.
