The role of the astronaut is in flux

When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. 

While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of Apollo 11—a spectacle that 20% of the world population watched live—Artemis II still attracted massive public interest. It drew tens of millions of viewers and inspired outpourings of “moon joy,” a term coined spontaneously during the mission that became a viral sensation. 

The expedition is only the first in a planned series of ambitious missions. The Artemis program aims to establish a human base on the south pole of the moon, operated by the US and its international and commercial partners, during the 2030s. China and Russia have teamed up to build their own crewed lunar base in the same region and on a similar timeline. Meanwhile, companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX hope to lock down the burgeoning extraterrestrial tourism market by flying civilian astronauts on private missions, with the long-term dream of taking them to the moon—or even Mars. 

But some overarching questions about this new era of space exploration linger, including perhaps the most existential one of all: What’s the point? Launching humans into space is dangerous and expensive, and it’s unclear whether it can deliver a better return on investment than we’d get if we were to send robots in our stead to make scientific discoveries or to conduct commercial activities, such as mining.

Since the dawn of human spaceflight, this line of questioning has been met with countless answers. We go to space for geopolitical prestige, manifest destiny, spiritual fulfillment, scientific curiosity, and, increasingly, business opportunities. 

In the wake of Artemis II, a slew of new books suggest that these justifications are subsumed by one unifying fact: Humans have itchy feet, and we are simply wired to roam. No matter the merits of any single rationale for sending people to space, they are all downstream of the basic evolutionary instinct to expand and adapt, which may not require much rational explanation at all. 

This simple motivation for human spaceflight is usually framed as aspirational: Explore new places, break new ground, adapt environments to suit our needs. But as our presence in space expands, we are bound to bring along the same human foibles that have stymied us on Earth. Frontiers like the moon and Mars will no longer be some hazy dreamlands onto which we can project our hopes, values, and favorite visions from science fiction. They will be workspaces for astronauts, places of commerce, military domains, tourist destinations, and heritage sites.

How we deal with all that is, literally, up in the air. At the moment, a relatively small group of players in human spaceflight have an outsize role in determining the path forward, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk standing as the most conspicuous example. But shrugging off the drive to leave Earth as an itch for exploration and domination that only nation-states and the ultrarich can scratch won’t cut it any more. Now is the time for everyone who cares about space exploration, no matter their backgrounds, to advocate for their own visions of our off-Earth future—before it is decided for them. 

The new space race

During the Apollo era, the justification for blasting astronauts into space was clear-cut: brinkmanship. As Cold War tensions peaked in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had every reason to demonstrate their technological prowess through human spaceflight. 

To be sure, the feat of sending humans to the moon inspired millions of people, many of whom went on to work in science and engineering. Chiao credits his own career as an astronaut to the Apollo 11 landing, which he watched, riveted, as an eight-year-old child in Wichita, Kansas. Decades later, he flew three space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station.

But while early milestones were met with giddy excitement, the space race was fundamentally animated by an implicit threat. Whichever nation proved superior in space could easily trade nuclear warheads for the astronauts it was launching on rockets that were essentially modified missiles. 

Fortunately, we are no longer on the brink of nuclear war <knock on wood>. NASA is, however, making an overt case that America is embroiled in a new space race, this time with China. Whereas the US and the USSR used spaceflight as a symbolic proxy for global technological dominance, Chiao told me in an interview that the new first-place prize could be uncontested access to valuable resources such as water, which could be sourced from ice patches on the south pole of the moon. 

Space law prohibits any nation from owning part of the moon, but these aging rules are about to endure road testing. Both the US and China plan to establish bases on the lunar south pole designed to support human crews for long periods. These outposts will inevitably be powered by nuclear reactors, so safety will require exclusion zones around them. 

The desire to spread our species beyond the planet is about more than technocratic bragging rights. It’s also ancient, primal, and perhaps unstoppable.

As a result, there could be a first-mover advantage to setting up shop on the most resource-rich patches of the moon, even if a nation never officially owns them. This is all speculative at the moment, and many skeptics in the legal, political, financial, and public spheres have cast doubt on the idea that a thriving market for space resources will materialize—at least in the near term.

Still, the rough contours of a human spaceflight economy—reaching to the surface of the moon and perhaps beyond—are beginning to take shape, and governments aren’t the only ones with plans to capitalize. Musk ultimately wants SpaceX to launch millions of civilians into orbit and eventually establish a permanent settlement on Mars. Whether or not those grand visions pan out, the company continues to make moves toward space tourism. Meanwhile, Blue Origin, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, has ferried more than 80 civilians on brief flights into suborbital space, including Star Trek icon William Shatner; pop star Katy Perry; and Jahangir, a cardiologist whose book describes the realization of a lifelong dream.  

Jahangir, who was born in Iran and grew up in Tennessee, worked tirelessly for years to qualify as an astronaut with NASA but never made the cut. He finally got his chance to leave Earth after winning a raffle for a seat on Blue Origin’s New Shepard–26 mission, which achieved a 10-minute flight to an altitude of 65 miles in August 2024.

For Jahangir, the flight was the ultimate pilgrimage. “To get to those ten minutes took forty years of dreaming and twenty years of hustling,” he writes in his memoir. “It was not the future I expected, growing up with plans to be a NASA astronaut, but it was the future I was given, and one I am grateful for.”

While these forays are personally fulfilling, from a business standpoint the core purpose of space tourism is, as ever, to turn a profit. And there are signs of some public discomfort with the increasing commodification of human spaceflight. Take, for example, the intense backlash to the all-­female Blue Origin mission that flew celebrity passengers like Perry, journalist Gayle King, Bezos’s now-wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and several others in April 2025. The attempt to brand the mission as a feminist milestone was mercilessly mocked online, hinting that questions about who gets to go to space, how they get there, and what they take away from the experience may inspire more acrimony and debate as these flights become increasingly common.

Expansionism of all sorts

Space visionaries are currently testing next-generation rockets, drawing up blueprints for moon bases, and racing to claim a stake in the future of human spaceflight. But the desire to spread our species beyond the planet is about more than technocratic bragging rights. It’s also ancient, primal, and perhaps unstoppable. And that isn’t a bad thing—harnessed properly, it could have benefits for our lives not just in space but on Earth. 

Weibel, who studies pilgrimages through an anthropological lens, points to the deep roots of our human yearning to voyage to a hallowed spot and be transformed. For decades, she has chronicled the stories of pilgrims who seek out the Black Madonna statue in the village of Rocamadour in southwestern France. The sculpture sits in a chapel built into a cliff, so visitors experience a sense of vertigo intermixed with spiritual wonder. 

Weibel’s “ultraview effect” is the cosmic version of this sensation—a spin on the overview effect, a term coined by the space philosopher Frank White to describe the revelatory experience of viewing Earth from orbit. The ultraview effect turns the astronautic gaze in the other direction, out into the incomprehensible immensity of the universe. Spacefarers report a feeling that is awesome and sublime in the old senses of those words: Their wonder is tempered by alienation, incomprehension, and what the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke termed “delightful horror.”

“These moments of wonder or strangeness, such as the ultraview effect,” are “when we realize the extent of the vast mysteries we are not equipped to understand,” Weibel writes. 

As if to make her point, at a NASA briefing in April, Reid Wiseman, the commander of Artemis II, recalled seeing the moon eclipse the sun from lunar space and telling a crewmate that he didn’t think “humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we are looking at right now.” 

The story that initially inspired The Ultraview Effect came from the same distant location, the far side of the moon—though it occurred decades ago. Weibel recounts her conversations with “Zack,” an Apollo command module pilot whose name was changed for anonymity. Turning away from the moon, Zack gazed out into the dizzying endlessness of space, with all the lights on his spacecraft switched off so he was “dark-adjusted.” But the takeaway was the same. “It changed my view of infinity,” Zack told Weibel. “Infinity is just something beyond what we can contemplate. So that changes your outlook on everything.”

Even without full immersion into darkness, suborbital passengers on commercial flights have reported a touch of what might be described as the ultraview effect. For instance, Shatner was clearly rattled after his Blue Origin flight in 2021. He described Earth’s skies as a “comforter of blue” and our planet as “mother” and “life,” but looking away from our world, he saw only a “black ugliness.” 

“Was that death?” he asked. “Is that the way death is?”

Likewise, Jahangir was struck by the contrast between the classic overview effect and its ultraview corollary. Earth “was brighter than anything I had imagined,” he writes in A Heart for Space. “Then I shifted my gaze up just slightly and saw the vastness and darkness of space. It was the blackest black I have ever seen, like staring into an inkwell. I just gazed, unable to comprehend what was before me and knowing that our atmosphere, our Earth, is home—a home we should protect at all costs.”

These anecdotes transcend any practical argument for human spaceflight: The constant jockeying for “top dog” status, the allure of unfathomable revenue, or the spinoff technologies that could lead to scientific breakthroughs. Pull off those layers and you have the hero’s journey. Across eras and cultures, some people simply feel the need to chase the horizon. Often, pilgrims in history and legend never return home. But when they do, they tend to bring back wisdom and guidance for a better world. 

For Elon Musk, the hero’s journey means expanding human life to Mars and beyond, to find a permanent presence among the stars. As Weibel explains, this idea is not new. For centuries, space visionaries have cast human space exploration as the final phase of our maturation as a species, a sentiment the Russian rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky summed up by declaring, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” 

The dream of an interstellar Earthling diaspora, one that could guarantee our continuation as a species, is hugely appealing, both as grist for science fiction and as a road map for our human future. But for Chiao, who is stoic on these matters, deliverance in space is a mirage. 

“It’s important to develop a way to deflect asteroids and develop a way to have humans sustainably live on a place like Mars, but to me, at some point we end,” he told me. “I know it sounds a bit odd, but there’s some comfort in that knowledge. We’re not in this race to save ourselves. There seems to be order in the universe, and probably every group of intelligent life has its own cycle. It’s okay to be extinct.”

In that scenario, our robotic spacecraft may outlive us. Even now, they are our most daring emissaries: They can surf the sun, explore hostile planets, and even break into the interstellar frontier. But while these spacecraft are our scouts, many people will always prefer to see themselves in space. “People identify when there’s a human out there doing it,” Chiao told me. “We’re just thrilled and amazed to see what comes back from these robotic probes, but I think you need both.”

Weibel points out that during the Apollo era, robotic spacecraft took pictures of Earth from lunar orbit. But it wasn’t until Bill Anders, an astronaut on board Apollo 8, snapped the famous “Earthrise” shot that the otherworldly view really hit home for the public. Similar shots from the Artemis II astronauts went viral, including a picture of Christina Koch gazing through the spacecraft window at Earth.

There are lots of reasons for humans to stay grounded, from the dangerous nature of spaceflight to the medical complications of long-term radiation exposure to the gargantuan expense. But it is unlikely we will stay put on Earth, even if we never make it far—for the same reason our ancestors crossed deserts, oceans, and mountains.

“Knowing somebody’s been there and can tell us about it when they come back—that’s a whole other level of it that makes it more compelling,” Weibel told me. “I’m not 100% sure why,” she adds, “but we trust witness testimony.” 

Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in upstate New York and the author of First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens.