From planet to planetarity: why I think archaeology needs a 'planetary turn'

This is a talk I presented at the AusTAG (Australian Theoretical Archaeology Group) conference in Adelaide, 22 May 2026, for the panel 'Planetarity and the technosphere: a ‘planetary turn’ for archaeology' with Professor Tracy Ireland and Dr Sean Williams. No AI was used to research or write this post.

Artist's impression of Sputnik 1 in Earth orbit. Image credit: unknown

I propose that archaeology takes a planetary turn. 

Many people have looked at Earth at the scale of the whole planet. In the 1920s, Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere became popular. In the 1970s, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed the Gaia hypothesis, where the entire Earth was a self-sustaining cybernetic mechanism. If the Gaia hypothesis tended to the utopian, then the Anthropocene, a concept introduced by Paul Crutzen in 2000, tended towards the dystopian. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz has characterised the Anthropocene with the very archaeological concept of the technosphere, a system comprising all the objects manufactured by humans, calculated to weigh thirty trillion tons.  

So this planetary scale of thinking isn’t new. 

Armillary sphere. Image courtesy of Hoika Mikhail

Many disciplines, however, including archaeology, are still geocentric. Even though geocentrism was abandoned after Copernicus displaced Earth as the centre of the universe in 1543, we haven’t yet taken the Copernican leap. We look at Earth as the only case, instead of one planet among many. 

So what is different now? Why should we adopt a planetary turn or perhaps, even, an interplanetary turn? 

For one thing, since the first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet in 1992, we now have over five thousand to compare Earth with. This tells us something: for example, at the galactic scale, Earth counts as a low-grav planet (Gorman 2023). 

Image credit: ESA

In addition, our planetary boundaries are increasingly being breached. Earth is surrounded by a halo of satellites and space junk. A small human population has lived in Earth orbit for 25 years. Spacefaring nations are proposing to return to the Moon to stay, and to use the Moon as a base to travel to Mars. Colonisation, resource extraction and a frontier mentality are again being mobilised to justify an expansion of human industries. Elon Musk has even stated that humans should become a multiplanetary species. 

But I don’t think this turn should mean just adding space, while keeping Earth as the unit of analysis. I think it’s more complex than that. 

Image credit: Martin Vargic

The concept of planetarity was introduced by Gayatri Spivak in her 2003 book Death of a Discipline. She described it as ‘the intuition that the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system’. ‘Its alterity,’ she said, ‘is mysterious and discontinuous—an experience of the impossible’. Rather than the cultural homogenisation of globalisation, planetarity combines ‘alienated localism and global unification’ as anthropologist Adam Fish says. It speaks to Indigenous theories and practices of relationality, that are neither anthropocentric nor geocentric (Fish 2024). 

Not everyone lives on the same Earth and we have no single species-wide experience of it – not even animals, plants and other living organisms have that. There are many planets and many Earths, and hence, many Moons and many Mars. Planetarity is an anti-Musk weapon: the geological certainty that he requires to assert the conquest of Mars evaporates even as he tries to fix it in time and space. 

Image credit: NASA

Images of Earth from outside, such as we see in the famous Earthrise and Blue Marble photos from the Apollo missions, show Earth as a fragile entity of incredible beauty. Astronauts who experience the Overview Effect of looking down on Earth talk of how you can’t see national boundaries or conflicts. Humanity appears as a united species all sailing on Spaceship Earth together. It’s our only home that needs to be protected. 

Spivak takes this in a different direction. She talks of “planetarity as making our home unheimlich or uncanny”. This draws on the original Freudian definition of unheimlich, which doesn’t just mean scary or unsettling. It’s literal translation is ‘unhomely’. The unheimlich is scary because the familiarity of home becomes unfamiliar. Unfamiliarity marks another aspect of the uncanny – repetition or doubling, walking in circles because you fail to recognise the streets already passed (Freud 1919). You can’t return home because you can’t recognise it. 

Planet vs sphere. Image credit: Alice Gorman

But the real question is, how we do a planetary archaeology and an archaeology of planetarity. We’ve been leading towards this with the development of space archaeology, which takes in the entire solar system. A planetary turn in archaeology both centres and decentres the planet as a unit of analysis. 

In the image above, I've tried to capture some of the relationships between the different theoretical versions of Earth, with possibly less success that I hoped. 

The planet and the lithosphere, as studied by geologists, are roughly equivalent. 

The planetary takes in the Anthropocene, where planetary boundaries – literally spatial boundaries but also thresholds – are being exceeded, affecting the stability of the biosphere, all of the affordances of lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere, on which current life on Earth has come to depend.

The technosphere is in dialogue with all of the other 'spheres', but I am not sure if this simple graphic represents its relationship to planetarity. At this point the singular planet spins out of control into other dimensions. My attempt to make a sort of mathematical progression doesn't really work.

Of course, what I don't have represented here is Vernadsky's noösphere, a concept also developed by Teilhard de Chardin. You can see I have some thinking and work to do.

But I thought I’d share with you what my ‘planetary turn’ might look like. 

How essential is bipedality to being human?

Terrestrial archaeology takes the influence of gravity for granted. But once you move off-Earth, human bodies and human material culture have to adapt to different kinds of gravity: microgravity in orbit, 1/6 of Earth gravity on the Moon and 1/3 Earth gravity on Mars. I’ve been exploring artefacts which I call gravity invariant, which function as designed no matter the gravity environment they are used in (Gorman 2023). I’ve also been thinking about what stripping gravity out could show us about human culture. Perhaps what survives irrespective of the planet or gravity regime is what is truly human. 

Image credit: NASA

Finally, let's have a look at the latest whole Earth image from the Artemis II mission which flew around the Moon in April 2026. I think this image (which I've also written about here) demonstrates something about the planetarity of Earth. 

If you look at the poles, you can see the northern and southern auroras as a thin greenish tinge, and zodiacal light on the lower left side, where there is an arc illuminated by the Sun. 

Aurora are caused by cosmic rays – high energy particles from the our Sun, the Milky Way and other galaxies beyond – travelling through the atmosphere to create the striking visual phenomenon that so captivates people. 

Zodiacal light is the reflection of the Sun’s rays through interplanetary dust created by comets and collisions between asteroids. This dust may also now include – in negligible but present quantities – dusts created from the breakdown of satellite and spacecraft material.

'Hello World' shows Earth in relation to things beyond itself. It makes visible the warp and weft of the cosmos. But it also stands in relation to other images from space, each representing a different cultural understanding of Earth.

A planetary turn is not an option. It’s a necessity.

References

Fish, Adam 2024 Planetary media: Decolonizing the space industry through Indigenous ownership. EPD: Society and Space 42(5-6) 

Freud, Sigmund. 1919 The Uncanny. Imago V: 297-324.

Gorman, A., 2023 A Post-Geocentric Gravitography of Human Culture. In Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space, pp. 480-492. London: Routledge.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2003 Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press

The Moon in the 1870s

'MOON: Inspires melancholy. Is it perhaps inhabited?'

- Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas, 1870s

'This Plain Would Be Nothing But an Immense Ossuary' by Émile-Antoine Bayard, 1870, illustration for Jules Verne's From The Earth to the Moon.

From 'Influence of the Moon on Plants', Border Watch (Mount Gambier, South Australia) Saturday 9 April 1870, page 2. I am not responsible for the typo.

'The Moon shines forth with peculiar brilliancy'.
 James Glaisher, Camille Flammarion, W. de Fonvielle, and Gaston Tissandier, 1871 Travels in the Air (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott).

From 'Is Our Moon Inhabited?', Wagga Wagga Advertiser and Riverine Reporter (NSW), Saturday 16 September 1871, page 4

How did Pluto become the symbol of oppressed white men and US ownership of the solar system?

It's the 20th anniversary of Pluto's plummet from planet to 'dwarf' planet.

A composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

In 1930, the ninth planet was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and spent nearly a century as part of our expanded solar system. If you're 100 years old in 2026, you were born into a solar system without Pluto, but it's likely that you don't remember it, as you would've been four when it was discovered.

In 2006, Pluto was kicked out of the ranks of the planets. The astronomer Mike Brown, who was largely responsible for this change of status, gleefully calls himself Plutokiller! Ever since, it's been a 'dwarf' planet.

In 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and turned it from a few pixels into an incredible planetary surface. It was thrilling! I wrote about the experience in this post. But despite all the Pluto-love this mission to the outer darkness generated, it was still a 'dwarf' planet. 

In April 2026, as the success of the Artemis II mission to the Moon caught the imagination of the world, NASA chief Jared Isaacman re-opened old wounds by stating that he supported making Pluto a planet again.

The deeper background here is that Isaacman was responding to a question from US Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas, where Clyde Tombaugh grew up. However, I don't think this detracts from the interpretation I'm about to put forward.

I'll come clean and declare my interest here. I would love Pluto to be a planet again. I was sad when it lost its planetary status. It seemed unfair. I think many of us felt that Pluto was an underdog in the planetary world, not like the other planets with it's odd orbit and outsized moon, and we felt we were sticking up for it because no one else would.

The demotion was also hotly contested. I'm not going to revisit the arguments but I want to remark on the fact that people are very emotionally invested in Pluto. It represents a lot of things to different communities. I'm quite happy to admit my own investment. But I'd want Pluto's elevation to be for scientific, not political, reasons. I want Pluto to be a planet on its own merit.

So I'm not sure how I feel about it becoming a US conservative symbol - the planetary equivalent of a white man who's been discriminated against by the woke. How did that happen?

I was contemplating Isaac's statement in the light of the Trump government's war on what is called in America Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI. (Let's also be clear that this is US terminology that has been popularised because it has become so controversial). 

This has got to the point where there is a claim that white men are being discriminated against, and every woman, person of colour, person with disabilities, LGBQTI+ and other diverse people have been unfairly employed, promoted and preferred - because they have no merit and took the place of a white man. The right chooses not to understand that a person can be qualified for the job AND belong to one of those categories.

So instead of DEI measures attempting to create a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity based on merit, anti-DEI is returning the US to a world where discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality etc is actively encouraged. So you don't actually get the best person for the job!

This argument is beyond ridiculous. To the privileged, equality feels like oppression, as they say. If you disagree with me on this, there is plenty of information out there to help you understand how wrong you are.

So ..... how does overturning a 20-year-old decision by planetary scientists and the International Astronomical Union fit into this agenda?

By analogy, if the Trump administration is overturning anything where marginalised groups are given equality, then Pluto must have been unfairly demoted and must be restored to achieve the right moral order. Pluto's an honorary white man. Or dog. (What does this make the other planets? I dare not ask).

The International Astronomical Union, of course, is in charge of things like planet definition and planetary nomenclature. Isaacman has to go through the same channels as everyone else to change definitions. Could there be something else going on here?

I believe there is. The reinstatement of Pluto is an assertion of US space power.

The US has felt it owned the Moon since it 'won' the Space Race with the Apollo missions in the 1960s. Isaacman reiterated this sentiment when Artemis II went to the Moon.

But it's not just the Moon. When New Horizons visited Pluto in 2015, there was a very nationalist message. The quote below is from my blog post here.

Science journalist Elise Cutts has noted how the likes of William Shatner and Elon Musk, famously an opponent of DEI, have jumped on the 'Make Pluto Planetary Again' bandwagon.

Pluto was demoted by the woke left, so reinstating it is a symbol of the Trump administration's commitment to white colonialism - from the Moon to the ends of the solar system.

Addendum: an additional factor that @casmilus.bsky.social and @drmlharris.bsky.social highlighted: Clyde Tombaugh was, of course, American, so it was the only planet discovered by an American that got booted out of the club. This helps make sense of the MAGA/nationalist connection.

@valwrites.ca points out that 'dwarf' planet is a problematic term. They're right. It could be a minor planet instead.

See also:

The day Pluto came to breakfast: Venetia Burney and a life in mathematics

Dr Space Junk's Guide to Voting For Names of Surface Features on Pluto

The Pluto pom-pom parameter

The Space Heritage Task Force (World Archaeological Congress 2003) Terms of Reference

At the fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC) in 2003, the first-ever conference session on space archaeology and heritage was held. You can read the session abstract here. 

In the plenary session where resolutions and such things were adopted, those of us in the conference session proposed the establishment of a Space Heritage Task Force. Task Forces were set up by WAC to investigate particular issues. But it wasn't the straightforward matter we imagined. The plenary audience did not respond positively when we spoke to our proposal. People thought we were kooky at best, and stupidly unhinged at worst. 

Then a woman stood up to speak. I didn't know her, although I did enquire afterwards. I regret to say I've forgotten her name but I'd like to thank and acknowledge her. She basically said that another similar resolution had been voted in, and for our proposal to be rejected just because it was about space was hypocritical and inconsistent: if the first had been accepted, then so should the second be, on the same basis. She swayed the entire room and our proposal for a Space Heritage Task Force was voted in. Members of the Task Force included me, Beth Laura O'Leary, John Campbell, Leslie Brown, and a few others.

I don't have the proposal any more, but I did find the terms of reference which I wrote for the Task Force later that year. I think it is a remarkably accurate description of what the field needed to consider. 

Space Heritage

WAC recognises that the material culture and places associated with space exploration are significant at individual, local, organisational, national and international levels. As space industries and eventual space colonisation develop in the 21st century, it is necessary to consider what and how elements of this cultural heritage should be preserved for the benefit of present and future generations.

The material culture of space exploration extends from the surface of the Earth to beyond the Solar System. In astronomy and rocketry its beginnings date from well before the Second World War. Sites, places and objects related to space exploration include research and development sites; launch facilities and tracking stations on Earth; satellites and so-called space junk in orbit round Earth; spacecraft and space debris in orbit around other bodies in the Solar System; landing and crash sites on the Moon, Mars, Venus, a small selection of asteroids and soon some of the moons of the outer planets, as well as both space and Earth-based telescopes and associated equipment and infrastructure.

As a basis for effective management, the significance of the material culture of space exploration must be understood. The Task Force will:

• Identify themes relating to space exploration with specific reference to the impact of space exploration on non-spacefaring nations, developing countries and Indigenous peoples;
• Investigate ways of assessing significance at individual, local, organisational, national and international levels.

Some sites, places and objects may have significance far beyond the local or national level. The Task Force will:

• Identify examples of such places, sites and objects that have exceptional cultural heritage value and whose preservation will benefit all humankind;
• Investigate avenues for preservation within existing structures, for example, the World Heritage Convention;
• Propose a set of cultural, historical, social and scientific criteria for preserving space heritage places of exceptional cultural heritage value.

The cooperation of international space agencies, national space agencies, the aerospace industry and the principal astronomical and astronautical associations is an essential part in ensuring the appropriate management of the cultural heritage of space exploration. The Task Force will:

• Identify relevant international and national organisations;
• Lobby relevant international and national bodies to ensure participation in preservation efforts;
• Explore avenues for raising sufficient funds for the preservation and where feasible conservation of at least a selection of space heritage places, sites and objects deemed of greater or exceptional significance.

The Space Heritage Task Force will present an interim report at the next WAC Inter-Congress conference.

A.C. Gorman and J.B. Campbell, November 2003

The NASA 'Hello World' photo shows an Earth interconnected with the cosmos

Apollo 8, Apollo 17 and Voyager 1 all took iconic photos of Earth from outside: Earthrise, Blue Marble and Pale Blue Dot. They inspired and motivated the environmental movement of the 1960s and 70s. 

But these images alone have not led to political action which ensures the protection of Earth’s environment. It takes more than a photograph to change the course of a capitalist system which views planets as resources to be extracted and sold.

Now we have a new image of Earth from outside taken by Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, dubbed 'Hello World'. It's a blue, fragile, Spaceship Earth - our only home, floating alone in a sea of darkness. Is it that different to the Blue Marble? 

It does show something new: northern and southern auroras, the thin greenish tinge over the poles, and zodiacal light on the lower side, illuminated by the Sun. 

Hello World. Credit: NASA

Aurora are caused by cosmic rays – high energy particles from the Milky Way, other galaxies beyond, and our sun - travelling through the atmosphere to create the visual phenomenon that has such a magical effect. 

Zodiacal light is the reflection of the sun’s rays through interplanetary dust created by comets and collisions between asteroids. It’s sometimes called the ‘false dawn’ because you see it before sunrise. It can also be seen from the surface of the Moon. 

What does this mean? Instead of the isolated Spaceship Earth, the Artemis II image shows Earth interconnected with the solar system and galaxy. We're part of something bigger than planetary boundaries.

We have a responsibility to the space environment that we’re part of – including the Moon.

Space Heritage and the Potential for Exoarchaeology in the Solar System (World Archaeological Congress 2003)

On June 21st - 26th 2003, the first ever conference session on space archaeology was convened at the World Archaeological Congress 5 in Washington DC. World Archaeological Congresses are based around themes, with sessions sitting under the themes. In the theme The Heavens Above: Archaeoastronomy, Space Heritage and SETI, there was a session on space heritage. Below is the session abstract.

Space Heritage And The Potential For Exoarchaeology In The Solar System: National And International Perspectives

Organized By

John Campbell (Australia) and Beth O’Leary (USA)

Session Details

Space Heritage is an appropriate term for the sites and artefacts associated with space exploration which we humans are creating both on Earth and off-world on other bodies such as the Moon and Mars. Although some sites on Earth might be protected by virtue of their continued use by large government and non-government organisations, sites which are off world are not as yet protected, at least not properly. 

The United Nations Outer Space Treaty recognises the artefacts and other so-called “space junk” on the Moon, Mars etc. as the property of the country which sent the spacecraft or probes to their destinations. However, very much as with Antarctica on Earth, land in space can not be owned by any particular country. This is why the “Lunar Legacy Project” was carried out and partly funded by NASA, namely to assess what is needed to protect the first landing site on the Moon, Apollo 11’s Tranquility Base. Some large private companies are already intending to send robotic missions to bring back artefact samples from other sites such as Apollo 12’s landing site (they were initially intending to sample Apollo 11 but have backed away from that proposal). 

When people colonise Mars, as they will someday, and perhaps the Moon, there should be international agreements in place to protect at least the more significant sites and artefacts from wanton tourism and “souveniring”, as well as uncontrolled or unmonitored scientific sampling. On Earth archaeologists normally obtain permission from the relevant communities and authorities before carrying out excavations. Excavating or sampling sites off-world should also require permission, though the difficulty of course is from whom? 

There are also sites and artefacts on Venus and further afield. Those on Venus are undergoing severe corrosion. Sites have been created on some of the asteroids as well, such as Eros, and they will be created on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, such as Europa and Titan (both of which are of interest because they might harbour life), and eventually further out in the Solar System. Artefacts in orbit round Earth and Mars, as well as eventually elsewhere, should also be considered, even if most of the items now in orbit round the Earth might be considered “space junk”.

This session has four papers, invited commentaries, open discussion of the issues and a workshop which will attempt to come up with some concrete proposals for the development of space heritage legislation and protocols. The urgent need for a new UN Space Heritage Treaty will also be addressed and a draft proposal planned.

Presentations

Assessing and Managing Human Space Heritage in the Solar System: The Current State of Play and Some Proposals

Dr John B. Campbell 

(School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia) 

Cultural Heritage Management in Orbit

Dr Alice C. Gorman (Environmental Protection Agency, Rockhampton, Australia)

The Cultural Landscape of Space

Dr Alice C. Gorman (Environmental Protection Agency, Rockhampton, Australia) 

Lunar Archaeology: A View of Federal U.S. Historic Preservation Law on the Moon

Dr Beth L. O’Leary (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, New Mexico State University, USA), Ralph Gibson (Kell House Museum, USA), John Versluis (North Platte Valley Museum, Gering, USA) and Leslie Brown (Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geophysics, Connecticut College, USA)

Session Time

Thursday Date 26th June

Time 9-11AM

In this post, I tell the story of the events leading up to my departure for Washington DC to present at the conference.

From Earthrise to Artemis II: new ways of seeing the Moon

The Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first time humans had orbited the Moon, is most famous for producing the Earthrise photo credited with kick-starting environmental activism. People are speculating about whether the Artemis II lunar mission will deliver images with equal impact.

Earthrise was taken by Bill Anders as the spacecraft flew over the far side of the Moon, the first time it had been seen with human eyes. People are entranced by the rising blue Earth, half in shadow, and the image has been analysed and written about countless times. Of course we have to remember that the photograph does not necessarily show the colours that human eyes saw. Nevertheless, the image painted Earth as beautiful, while the Moon was ugly.

The eye is drawn to the blue and white Earth. It seems a fragile sphere of light and life, contrasted with the hard, rocky monochrome surface of the Moon. But what about this surface underneath? This is what I want to explore in this post.

Under Old Earth

If we draw our gaze away from Earth and down to the Moon, what do we see? 

The surface is sort of a mild beige colour with white highlights. It's not smooth, but gently undulating. This is because the photo was taken at sub-solar point, so there's no shadows, like midday on Earth. When the sun is high, the Moon tends to take on browner hues. The craters visible at other times of day aren't so prominent: we depend on the shadows to see depth and elevation. 

The main geological formation is Pasteur crater, which is 233 km in diameter. Crater Pasteur T, 40 km in diameter, is a 'satellite crater' located on the west side of Pasteur. The satellite craters were created by later impacts. There's at least 14 which have a letter designation. Apollo 8 passed over many of them.

Pasteur T was renamed 'Anders' Earthrise' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission in 2018. Ganskiy M crater, 12.5 km in diameter. was renamed 'Homeward 8'. It was at this point that the spacecraft fired its engines to begin the return journey to Earth.

The Earthrise landscape with the renamed craters. Credit: NASA/IAU

The Earthrise landscape, flat. Credit: NASA/IAU

On Apollo 8's first orbit, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Bormann made their first observations of the Moon close-up with human eyes. 

These days we see a lunar landscape and just assume that the round features we're looking at are impact craters, but this wasn't always the case. Before NASA's lunar exploration programme began in the 1960s, there was debate about whether the circular topography observed was created by volcanic events - inside the Moon - or impact events - from outside the Moon. By the time of Apollo 8, the meteorite theory was gaining ascendance. Bill Anders referred to this when he said 'Whew! Well, we answered it. They're meteorites, aren't they?' (069:15:17).

The astronauts' impressions of the lunar landscape are recorded in the transcript of their conversations with each other and mission control. I've accessed these through the incredible resource which is the Apollo Lunar Flight Journal.

Dirty beach sand

As the astronauts responded to the view on their first lunar encounter, Anders said, 'It looks like a big - looks like a big beach down there' (069:15:24). They were looking at the far side. A commentator on the Apollo 8 transcript said that the far side had a distinct appearance, compared to the near side:

Instead, this landscape is a beat-up mish-mash of overlapping large craters whose ancient forms have been smoothed by aeons of relentless sandblasting from space. Its rounded, undulating topography reminds Bill of a sandy beach which has seen the passage of many feet.

Lovell commented on how grey it was (069:18:08), and later he emphasised this again: "Okay, Houston. The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand" (069:51:16). This became the dominant metaphor, and both Lovell and Anders mentioned it again on their second orbit as they were passing over the Pasteur region: 

Lovell: "Say, Bill. How would you describe the color of the Moon from here?" (071:44:10). Anders: The color of the Moon looks, ah, a very whitish gray, like dirty beach sand, and with lots of footprints in it" (071:44:14). 

Of course there were no footprints on the surface of the Moon yet, and if there were they wouldn't have been distinguishable at 70 km anyway. The Apollo 8 astronauts would've had no idea just how significant footprints in the regolith would become in lunar iconographies. 

And this was a beach with no water. It had the appearance of a beach with none of the geological processes which created one.

I wondered if there was any particular dirty beach that Anders had in mind. In an interview done with Ron Judd when he was 79, Anders recalled 'a California beach where he used to sneak off with Valerie', his wife, as his inspiration. This might refer to his period at Hamilton Air Force Base in 1956, when he and Valerie were either not yet married, or newly married, which might account for the sneaking off. The base was located on San Pablo Bay, which is a tidal estuary; so the beaches were not on the open ocean - they were where the rivers gave out to the sea. By 'dirty beach sand', Anders may have meant the tidal beaches along the edges of the bay, grey river silt.

Satellite picture of San Pablo Bay, Carquinez Strait, and Suisun Bay 
©2004 Matthew Trump, adapted from public domain NASA satellite photo.

I haven't been able to find any good images of the area in the 1950s to illustrate this, so it is a theory at the moment, but it's worth thinking about the metaphor of a grey silty river beach rather than polluted ocean sand. The comparison Anders is making is not that the Moon is a dirty beach compared to pristine yellow or white ocean beaches on Earth. The comparison is between a tidal riverine beach and an open ocean beach; so I think this is quite a different sort of metaphor. We might imagine the footprints, as Anders imagined the small craters overlying Pasteur T, as those of the young lovers as they walked along hand-in-hand.

And the orbits rolled by

When you see the Earthrise photo, the Moon is static and the unseen spacecraft is hanging frozen above it. The camera shutter has barely closed. Time has stopped. It's easy to forget how dynamic the moment was. The Apollo 8 astronauts saw the lunar surface in motion, at all points of the day and night, as shadows lengthened and shortened. 

The Apollo 8 mission showed us Earthrise on the Moon, but perhaps equally significant is that it showed us sunrise and sunset on the Moon through human eyes. They took images of the terminator as it passed over crater Mechnikov, light and shadows turning to pure black as they whirled into lunar night. Nightfall on another planet! Such a mundane, daily experience on Earth, but here, strange and otherworldly.

They saw a rich and dynamic shadow landscape created by the depths and heights of craters and seas and mountains and rilles. Many of the craters had names, and they could correlate them with the maps that they had studied on Earth. They made a roll-call of craters as they flew over them. The static Earthrise photo contributes to the impression of a dead Moon because none of this movement is captured in it. 

The colours and textures changed as they spun past, but the astronauts persisted in their interpretation of lifelessness and nothingness, which have come to dominate how people understand the Moon. Lovell said 'We don't know whether you can see it from the TV screen, but the Moon is nothing but a milky white. Completely void' (085:44:28). 

During a live broadcast to Earth, Borman said 'What we'll do now is follow the trail that we've been following all day and take you on through to a lunar sunset. The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of - each one carries his own impression of what he's seen today. I know my own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone...' (085:44:58).

Who else has seen this landscape?

Of course, Apollo 8 has not been our only view of this landscape. It existed before and it will exist after Earthrise .... it's dynamic, with the Earth in motion continuously. There are Earthrises and Earthsets every day.

The Soviet orbiter Luna 3 sent back the first images of the far side in 1959. In 1961, the International Astronomical Union named a crater photographed by Luna 3 'Pasteur', but it was not well defined.

The first US lunar orbiters, Lunar Orbiter 1 and Lunar Orbiter 2, launched in 1966, got coverage of nearly the whole Moon. LO1 took the first robotic photograph of an Earthrise, but it was in black and white.  LO2  photographed Pasteur crater from 1, 790 km.

Pasteur crater taken by Lunar Orbiter 2. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image

The Soviet Zond 5 and 6 spacecraft flew round the Moon in September and November 1968, and seem to have taken photographs. But the region was still vaguely defined by the time Apollo 8 went past. The crew's unofficial name for Pasteur was Borman. After the mission, Apollo 8 data was used by the IAU to firm up names for landscape features and Pasteur became official.

Apollo 15 snapped the Earthrise landscape (I'm going to call it this from now on) from orbit in 1971. Apollo 17 photographed it in 1972, from an oblique angle. You can see the little craters that looked like footprints to Anders.

Oblique view of Anders' Earthrise crater, facing west. Taken by Apollo 17 panoramic camera. Credit: James Stuby based on NASA image

There have been other lunar orbiters too, like Clementine, which orbited briefly in 1994, and the Japanese Kaguya, launched to the Moon in 2007. Kaguya took many photos of Earthrise and Earthset but I'm not sure if any of them were over Pasteur. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched by NASA in 2009. It has mapped the Earthrise landscape during multiple passes, using the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument. 

If we went trawling through the archives we would no doubt find the Earthrise landscape in many different lights and moods, taken by different spacecraft at different distances from the lunar surface. 

A Site of Special Scientific Interest?

In 2025, Working Group 1 of the Global Expert Group for Sustainable Lunar Activity (GEGSLA) proposed that Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) should be identified on the Moon. One of the categories was radio-quiet areas, which need to be protected so that radio astronomy can be carried out. The far side is ideal for this as it is shielded from the radio pollution coming from Earth. It's vital that areas of the far side are sequestered from radio interference created by future lunar satellites, industries and permanent bases - before it's too late.

The Earthrise landscape is potentially one of these areas. In 2024, ESA's JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) spacecraft flew past the Earthrise landscape and used it to test the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) instrument. This instrument uses radar to measure the topology of rocky bodies. To get good results, RIME needs to measure precisely the differences in how radio waves bounce back from the surface - for example, from the rocks underlying Europa's oceans. It needed radio quiet, and the far side of the Moon was ideal to test this. All the other instruments were turned off for eight minutes so there was complete radio silence. The RIME instrument's results were assessed against LOLA's measurements to make sure it was working properly. It was so radio quiet that all they could hear was noise from one of the other instruments - which ESA then had to fix before the spacecraft continued its journey to the moons of Jupiter!

The combination of scientific utility and cultural associations gives the Earthrise landscape exceptional natural and cultural value. I'm not going to do a formal significance assessment in this post, but will note that multiple strands of significance converge on this place. Perhaps this makes the Earthrise landscape a good candidate for a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The eyes of Artemis II 

Bill Anders famously said 'We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.'

The economist Barbara Ward, author of Spaceship Earth and one of the founders of sustainable development, was filled with optimism:

Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the barren horizons of the moon. Indeed, we in this generation would be some kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.

She saw Earthrise playing a role in the foundation of a 'moral community' that would enable a more equitable distribution of the planet’s wealth. 

We've seen Earthrise now. We've seen many views of Earth from outside and many views of the lunar surface. Earthrise still has the power to astonish, but it has not led to the radical change in attitudes towards Earth's fragile environment that it heralded. 

Apollo 8 orbited at about 100 km, while Artemis II, planned to launch from the US on April 1, 2026, will see the Moon from around 7, 600 km. It won't be a similar perspective. But, for the first time, it won't be a white American male gaze either. The 4-person crew includes a woman (Christina Koch), a Canadian (Jeremy Hansen), and a person of colour (Victor Glover). All of the crew, except Jeremy Hansen, have been in space before. They've seen Earth. Now, they'll see the Moon, with all the hindsight of the nearly 60 years of space activities since 1968, knowing that there are plans to mine its resources and build infrastructure to sustain more permanent human residence. They'll be taking photos - more details about the spacecraft's cameras are here - and talking about what they see. I don't know if or when we'll get that transcript. But I want to know what the crew say, what their emotional response will be.

What I'm looking for from Artemis II is a not a new Earth. It's a new revelation of the Moon - or at least the start of one. 

I don't want to expect too much of the crew. They shouldn't have to have the burden of being profound as well as doing their jobs, but I am hopeful that they won't simply replicate the Apollo 8 mantra of the desolate, barren Moon. I'd like to see a vision of the Moon as part of the Earth system, not the almost adversarial relationship that Earthrise set up. 

To my mind, there's another significant image taken by Apollo 8 that hasn't received much attention. During an attitude change, the spacecraft was pointing away from the Moon and looking beyond Earth, which appears in the lower left corner. Earth is not the focus of the image. It's decentred from its place at our core. Instead, we're looking into the blackness of space and out to the solar system beyond. It' a Copernican rather than a Ptolemaic vision.

Earth, photographed from Apollo 8 during attitude change at 075:58:38. Credit: NASA

It reminds me of something that James Clerk Maxwell said in Matter and Motion, published in 1876.

There are no landmarks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion, so that we cannot tell where we are. We are, as it were, on an unruffied sea, without stars, compass, sounding, wind or tide, and we cannot tell in what direction we are going.