In this edition of Technopolitik, Ashwin Prasad gives a brief history of the “First Moon Flights” Club and the illusion of inevitable progress.
It was 1964 when Gerhard Pistor decided to do something unusual. He walked into a travel agency in Vienna and demanded a flight ticket to the Moon. You might expect the agent to suppress a chuckle and politely dismiss him. But he didn’t. Instead, the request was forwarded to Pan Am.
Interestingly, Pan Am took it seriously. The airline replied to Pistor, noting that the first flight was anticipated by the year 2000. Seeing the potential for marketing, they announced a free reservation list for lunar flights. Whether it was seen as a light-hearted stunt or a genuine promise, people signed up. After the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, enthusiasm surged. By 1971, the list held 93,000 names from nearly 100 countries.
Look past the clever marketing and this story hints at the era’s technological optimism. It wasn’t just that the Moon captured the imagination, it always had. It was that people genuinely believed they would fly there in their lifetimes. And why wouldn’t they? The Wright brothers had flown at the turn of the century; commercial transatlantic flights followed just 40 years later. With Neil Armstrong’s boot print fresh in the dust, commercial lunar flights seemed like the logical next step.
Yet, here we are in 2025, grounded. Why? The political reason is clear: the US won the race, the Cold War ended, and the incentive to spend billions evaporated. But why didn’t public opinion demand more?
Ideally, popularity should drive policy, but in spaceflight, it rarely does. Even during the Apollo peak, 45% to 60% of Americans felt the government was spending too much on space, arguing those funds belonged in education or healthcare. The Cold War provided the political cover to ignore this opposition. The Space Race was a quest for scientific and military dominance, an ideological battle that filtered down to the masses as national pride. Once the USSR faltered, the gears of that political machine ground to a halt. The novelty wore off.
For over five decades, humans have not returned. The reasoning is simple. There is no business model here. Scientific discovery alone cannot sustain human spaceflight. Economic or military reasons are a necessity. If science is the only goal, uncrewed rovers are safer, cheaper, and more efficient. The Apollo program produced various technology breakthroughs that then diffused throughout the economy and created real value. Things like foam beds coming out of spacecraft seats or camera-on-a-chip revolutionising smartphones. But the possibility of incidental spin-offs alone cannot build political will.
Theorists point to the Moon as a gravity well for Mars launches or a source of ice for rocket fuel. Government agencies will someday attempt these milestones. Until they do and find meaningful economic and military value, we will not see organic human activity there.
In recent times, the silence is breaking. For those of you following the news cycles, conversations of lunar human spaceflight have ramped up again. After a 50-year pause, the emergence of China as a credible space power has reignited the competition. China has announced its intentions to land its taikonauts on the Moon. The US has a successor to the Apollo program, called the Artemis program. It intends to land astronauts on the Moon again in the next few years. India has plans for a future Chandrayaan mission to take Indians to the Moon. We live in interesting times.