Our moon is in the news just now—a story about four astronauts in a spacecraft jumping over the moon. So far the mission, named Artemis II, seems to have gone well except for a broken toilet.

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When I was ten years old, in 1953, one of my favorite hangouts was the Hayden Planetarium, which is part of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. I sat raptly through the shows, thrust my little hand into the cavities of the Willamette meteorite, and stood on the scales that showed how much I’d weigh elsewhere in the solar system: 11.6 pounds on the moon, 27 on Mars, 177 on Jupiter. I was star-crazy. In a previous blog post I wrote about this, about wanting to be the first little girl on Mars.

I don’t remember when we got our first television, but in addition to the westerns and cartoons, I became addicted to Captain Video, a science fiction series. It had cheap sets and ridiculous plots, yet was convincing enough to a small child. By my early teens I was devouring science fiction novels. I believed it was just a matter of time before humans developed the technology to carry us across the galaxy.

Back then the popular kids made fun of us science nerds. These were the boys who didn’t get straight A’s but excelled at sports, and the girls who dressed stylishly, who giggled and flirted with the jocks. They called us “eggheads,” and if we wore glasses, “four eyes.” And yes. It hurt.

Then, on October 5, 1957, a month after I’d started attending the Bronx High School of Science, I saw the New York Times headline: SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H. That was Sputnik. America panicked at the news. Here we were in the midst of the Cold War, and we were falling behind technologically. The “commies” were beating us. President Eisenhower called for changes in the educational system, saying, “we need scientists in the ten years ahead…scrutinize your school’s curriculum and standards.” That uproar eventually led to the formation of NASA.

My initial reaction to the fuss was a kind of schadenfreude. All those popular people who scorned nerds were now suffering for it. Now maybe we would get a measure of respect. However, my satisfaction didn’t last long. As I wrote in that earlier blog post, I approached an air force recruiter who came to our high school, thinking the military would train me as a pilot, which would be my ticket to space, and he told me they don’t teach girls to fly, just to be secretaries or weather girls.

At any rate I drifted away from science during my junior year, when I got to choose a non-science elective. I was falling asleep in chemistry class but came alive in creative writing sessions.

On June 16, 1963, the Soviets launched the first woman astronaut, an amateur skydiver named Valentina Tereshkova. This was 20 years before the United States gave that honor to a woman, Sally Ride, a NASA physicist who also held a private pilot’s license.

Tereshkova’s story didn’t really catch my attention. At that time I was preoccupied with my first lesbian affair, leaving my parents’ home, trying to figure out how I’d manage to work nine to five and finish my B.A. at night, and protesting the Vietnam War.

I next noticed the space program on July 21, 1969, when I went to Central Park where a giant screen had been set up so we could watch a man walk on the moon. Once again I had other preoccupations: the Stonewall Riot had occurred three weeks before and some of us were organizing that first post-Stonewall gay protest march—and the Gay Liberation Front.

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In 1990, 21 years later, a couple of aerospace engineers wrote a paper calling for humans to go to Mars. They and other colleagues subsequently formed The Mars Society, whose purpose was to promote colonization of the red planet. Robert Zubrin, co-author of that original paper and president of the society, also advocated American dominance of the heavens, writing that “if we desire peace on Earth, we need to prepare for war in space.”

I am reminded of a line from Tacitus: “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.”

Elon Musk joined the society in 2001, and became a member of the board of directors after donating $100,000. Musk, the world’s richest man, with an ego even more bloated than his bank account, doesn’t intend to make the journey himself. He wants his offspring to populate the planet. So far he has 14 of them, by four different women.

Terrestrial life can’t survive on Mars. These lunatics (or marsatics, to coin a word) aren’t just thinking about enclosed pressurized domes where humans would work, venturing outside only for research or mining minerals. Their idea is to terraform Mars—that is, to re-form the surface of Mars to create conditions resembling those on Earth. Eventually they want to spread our species throughout the universe, to survive after they finish trashing our planet, and even after the sun goes nova in another 5 billion years.

Here’s what Mars is like currently:

• An average surface temperature of -80F. That’s minus 80 degrees, and it’s an average—it can get quite a bit colder.
• A surface pressure that is 0.6% that of Earth, comparable to the pressure at 18.9 miles up into Earth’s stratosphere.
• An atmosphere composed primarily of carbon dioxide (95.97%), argon (1.93%), and nitrogen (1.89%). There are only trace amounts of oxygen (0.146%). By comparison, Earth’s atmosphere is 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and 0.04% carbon dioxide.
• Cosmic radiation 40-50 times higher than Earth’s, due to the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field. Humans could stay on the planet for only four years, after which the exposure would be fatal.

According to a NASA study, terraforming Mars is simply not possible using present day technology.  I’ve read that the surface temperature could be raised somewhat by releasing the frozen CO₂ at the poles, but an oxygen-rich environment would take thousands of years to establish. Also, since Mars lacks a magnetic field, any newly created atmosphere would be stripped away by solar wind. Even if that weren’t the case, Mars’s low gravity would limit the planet’s ability to retain an adequately thick atmosphere.

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Now about that broken toilet: Those earlier American astronauts who made lunar landings, there to plant American flags, evacuated into plastic bags and deposited their waste on the moon.

With current technology, it should take seven to nine months for astronauts to reach Mars. How will they store that much food on a spacecraft? What about water? Will they fling their shit into space, where it may eventually land splat on some other planet in our solar system, or more likely drift off into interstellar space, sending a message about us to wherever it finally lands?

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It’s been more than half a century since I entertained the fantasy of becoming an astronaut, but I’m still star-crazy. On clear evenings I go outside and look up, and murmur their names, poetry on my lips. This week I can see Venus about to set. Orion and Sirius aren’t far behind, followed by Aldebaran, Procyon, Castor and Pollux—and there’s Jupiter overhead, and Arcturus to the east!

They put my petty troubles in perspective, and give me peace. Born billions of years before us, they will light the skies long after we’re gone, long after the warmongers and egomaniacs are done strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage

and then are heard no more.