Moon Missions Are Our Cathedrals
Written 2026-04-01
We don't do anything extravagant anymore. Everything we do here on Earth is anchored in cost and return on investment. Why build a beautiful structure out of stone, with massive stained glass windows and walls covered with frescoes and intricate carvings, when steel and concrete will do the trick? Beauty doesn't cashflow. Awe-inspiring monuments that will be admired for millenia most likely aren't the most efficient use of capital. This is inevitable in a free market; investors need a return, and they're going to make cuts anywhere they can to get it. Beauty and awe serve no functional purpose (at least as far as capital is concerned), and so they're the first to go.
The cathedrals of the middle ages, as well as other monumental structures built throughout history, were built by an entirely different kind of society. Markets weren't as free, religion and morality bore much more weight, and the industrial-age obsession with opitimization and efficiency had not yet set in. The "powers that were" who built these structures were more apt to "waste" resources on massive projects in order to prove a point. While I'm not advocating for a return to feudalism, I can't help but feel like something was lost. Today, we no longer do things simply to prove a point, simply to inspire awe. There is one exception to this, and that is space travel.
If you think about human space travel, it's probably the worst investment you can make. It's ridiculously expensive, and it serves no immediate purpose. Sure, over the next centuries or millenia, it is extremely possible that the Earth will become uninhabitable (and that it will be our fault). However, today's investors will almost certainly not be alive for that. And even if we knew for certain that the Earth was going to become uninhabitable within one or two lifetimes, we would not be able to innovate fast enough to get anybody off of this planet and onto a better one in time. What is the point, then, of reaching for the stars? What is the point of laying the groundwork for humans to become interplanetary, even if we know that it most likely won't happen for centuries or more? The point is: it's awesome.
Very luckily for all of us, the most powerful nations in the world, all of whom have already performed every conceivable earthly "flex," still have points they need to prove. In a further win for humanity, they're doing this with public money, and you can rest easy knowing that if approximately $93B of government money wasn't spent on NASA's Artemis program between 2012 and 2025, it would have been lit on fire by some other public project, like Seattle's $142B light rail expansion, or simply embezzled. And because nation-state egos don't play by free market rules, we get to look up at the night sky and marvel at man's greatest achievement thus far. When you watch these events take place, whether in real life or on television, know that the spectacle you're witnessing is to you what the construction of the Notre Dame was to the Parisians of the 12th century: a marvel.