Traditionally, stories about the Cree trickster Wîsahkêcâhk are only told when there is snow on the ground, which means, as the planet rapidly warms, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to tell them. Vancouver, where I live, didn’t see a single snowflake until February. So instead of the legend of the creation of the moon, I’ll tell you her name: tipiskâwi-pîsim, night sun. In Anishinaabemowin, she is Nookomis Dibik-Giizis, the revered Grandmother Moon. Though almost every acre on land has been claimed by one nation or another, the moon has been a shared locus of imagination and significance, if only because she was out of reach. For hundreds of generations, we could only gaze at her from the Earth; now, for the first time in more than half a century, humans will pass over her face like a curious hand.
When Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen blasts off as part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, he will become the first Canadian on a moon mission. The fifty-year-old astronaut had not yet been born the last time humans travelled so far into space, nor had any of his three crew members. Their ten-day space cruise, around the moon and back, has been publicized in a way that was unimaginable to the crew of that final Apollo mission; commander Reid Wiseman has been sharing weekly updates on Instagram, as has Hansen in his patriotically bilingual updates on his own account. Several articles have described how toilet technology has improved since the last moon missions; such is the fervent, abiding fascination with the logistics of space travel.
The blast of patriotic enthusiasm accompanying the mission seems powerful enough to fuel its launch, though it’s worth remembering what we plan to do when we get to the moon. “So many countries right now are realizing the value in what we can bring back by going to the moon,” Christina Koch, another member of the Artemis II crew, told CBS News. “The industry gains, the knowledge gains, the scientific gains, the inspiration gains.” Leading with industry is telling; the eventual plan is, of course, to transform the moon from a place of imagination to one of profit.
Who will profit, exactly? The entire history of humanity provides some clues. No nation can claim the moon for themselves: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 stipulates that “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.” However, there’s no explicit prohibition against anyone claiming what they extract from the moon or other celestial bodies.
The Artemis Accords, established by NASA under the first administration of United States president Donald Trump and signed by more than sixty nations to date, were written to explicitly allow for the commercialization of the moon. The Artemis missions advance incrementally toward mining its water, ice, and minerals. In Canada, federal funds are flowing toward research and technological developments in space mining, as well as efforts to put a Canadian-made nuclear reactor on the moon.
As space archaeologist Alice Gorman writes, space exploration is an explicitly colonial fantasy, eyeing an “untamed wilderness . . . waiting to be filled with value.” Space mining will be a $20 billion (US) industry by 2035; as on Earth, most of those profits will likely flow to private companies. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a multi-billion-dollar contract to build a starship and landing system for the next Artemis mission. (Subsequent missions will bring the first humans to the surface of the moon since 1972 and establish a permanent base on the moon.)
Musk, who has apocalyptic convictions, has argued humans need to colonize space to survive and recently posted on his social media platform X that SpaceX plans to build a “self-growing city on the Moon” within the next decade. On the same platform, he frequently reposts white supremacists and racist conspiracy theories that mirror his own personal ambitions to father as many white children as possible. Though the Artemis II crew is diverse—including not only the first Canadian but the first Black and female astronauts to travel to the moon—it’s hard to imagine such diversity in Musk’s lunar company town.
Space exploration has a long and troubled history here on Earth, dating back to the rocket technology used by the US to launch its first satellite into space, which was developed in Germany during World War II by Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun using concentration camp prisoners as slave labourers. Indigenous Hawaiians have protested the construction of telescopes on their sacred mountain, Mauna Kea, while First Nations in South Australia have raised concerns about the environmental impacts of rocket testing on their traditional lands. The Navajo Nation has objected to a private company offering “memorial spaceflights” that would deposit cremated remains on the moon—for $12,995 (US) and up—describing it as a “profound desecration” of a sacred site. Their concern points to an obvious flaw in the noble aims of the Outer Space Treaty to ensure space exploration benefits all of humanity: we see different values in the moon, as well as the Earth.
On our home planet, the costs of mining—contaminated water, denuded landscapes, violations of Indigenous rights—are borne by everyone and endure long after the profits dry up. While you might argue that, at least in space, we might not harm any living things directly—though scientists speculate there could be microbial lifeforms on the moon—our activities there have lingering impacts. Already, there are half a million pounds of trash on the moon and more than 10,000 satellites littering the night sky, thousands of which are defunct. A nimbus of space garbage already surrounds the Earth, including a red Tesla convertible dumped there by Musk, and hundreds of decommissioned spacecraft are heaped on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike those vessels, directed to the remote Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean, space junk often falls at random; as a Saskatchewan farmer discovered in 2024 when a forty-kilogram chunk of space garbage landed in his field, it can be hard to find anyone to take responsibility. The vast majority of us will never travel to space or profit directly from its exploitation, but we may still find ourselves dealing with the costs.
In Canada, it feels as though we have reached an impasse when it comes to reckoning with colonialism. Almost everyone can agree bad things happened, as long as the passive voice is used. Symbolic reconciliation was tolerable until it began to solidify in the form of rights recognition in the courts and financial settlements from the government; now, many say it’s gone too far, even if they would be hard-pressed to explain how these efforts have negatively impacted them specifically.
Everyone prefers to look forward into a bright and equitable future unburdened by history. This cheerfully amnesiac approach has hit its limits on Earth, where humans have contaminated the planet so totally that even deep-sea creatures and glacial lakes are full of microplastics. But in space, it seems, there are abundant opportunities to make the same mistakes again. It’s hard to be excited for the future when it looks so much like the present.
Julieta Caballero is an illustrator-at-large at The Walrus.