hen conspiracy theorists examine the first moon landing with a sceptical eye, they look at the flag and note that it appears to be flapping in the wind. “Ah ha!” they squawk. “But there is no wind on the moon, therefore the whole thing was a fake and was being filmed on a Hollywood set somewhere, presumably equipped with a wind machine.”
But, of course, the flag is behaving the way flags behave on the moon or elsewhere when they are being manoeuvred into position. And the crucial point that the conspiracy theorists miss, which is staring them right in the face, is that this is an American flag that is being planted on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were doing exactly what Captain Cook did in Botany Bay and Columbus before him: sticking a flag in the earth and thereby – implicitly in the case of Apollo 11 – laying claim to ownership of the territory.
Except that in this case it wasn’t earth, because it was the surface of the moon. It was, quite literally, out of this world. The scramble for outer space began there. And it is continuing apace. It’s not Star Wars – not yet. But the carve-up of great chunks of extraterrestrial real estate is happening right now. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said inequality originated the day someone drew a line around a small patch of earth and said: “This is mine!” Now those lines are being drawn on other planets and moons and asteroids. Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, recently asserted: “Venus is a Russian planet.” Meanwhile the United States is determined to brand its name onto everything else spinning around the solar system.
