The Broken Promise: From the Lunar ‘We’ to the Martian ‘I’

Luis Fernando Gutiérrez Cardona 

In 1961, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the 20th century’s most memorable speeches. There, he promised that the United States would send a human to the Moon and bring them back. That last part—the return—was no mere technical detail: it was the heart of the promise. The feat wasn’t about arriving, but completing the cycle. Go, touch, return, tell. All of humanity would be the protagonist of a shared future. In 1969, when Armstrong said, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” that “we” still resonated with sincerity. We were collective witnesses to our own capacity.

More than half a century later, the language has shifted in a silent but profound way. NASA will send people to the Moon in Artemis II, but the epic of “we went” has evaporated. Talk of “returning” sounds like going back to the supermarket: a technical errand, a dress rehearsal, a layover. The Moon, once a destination, is now infrastructure—a testing ground for what really matters: Mars.

And here’s what’s unsettling. The narrative is no longer collective. The Apollo project, though geopolitical, cloaked itself in the garb of human progress. Today, the space race is told in corporate and personal terms. Artemis is, above all, a reaffirmation of technological hegemony. Then there’s the figure of the visionary billionaire—Elon Musk and SpaceX—who has achieved the impossible: personalizing the Martian dream. It’s no longer “humanity is going to Mars,” but “I will take you to Mars.” Glory, legacy, vision (and its businesses) are concentrated in a proper name. The “we” has fragmented into national interests and private ambitions.

But there’s something deeper, and language betrays it: the verb “return” is disappearing. And it’s no coincidence. Because bringing someone back from Mars is, for now, an almost insoluble problem.

The reasons are brutally material: There’s no infrastructure on Mars for a return launch. No ramps, no waiting rockets. Producing fuel there is an unproven engineering dream. The mass needed for a round trip makes it unfeasible to “bring everything from here.” Cosmic radiation over the years of the mission accumulates irreversible damage in the human body. Launch windows open only every 26 months; a failure, a dust storm, and the wait stretches for years, consuming resources and hope.

That’s why, in documents and statements, “return” is used in the conditional or omitted altogether. They speak of “going,” “exploring,” “establishing presence,” “colonizing.” Mars is framed not as a destination from which one returns, but as a place one arrives to stay.

This grammatical omission reveals a tectonic shift in our imagination. The project is no longer a demonstration, but an escape. Here’s the most absurd paradox: the most sophisticated ingenuity is mobilized to flee a living planet that this same ingenuity—in its industrial and predatory form—is killing. We fantasize about terraforming Mars, a process that would demand centuries and colossal energy, while declaring it unfeasible to halt deforestation or ocean acidification on Earth in decades. Colonizing a dead world—without air, accessible liquid water, toxic soil—is announced as a refuge from a living world we’re suffocating. It’s the logic of someone who, instead of repairing their ship, swims toward a distant, arid island.

The “giant leap for mankind” has mutated. It’s no longer a step for all, but the adventure (or flight) of a few. The rest of us are spectators, customers of the narrative, or residual population on a damaged planet.

What began as a promise to complete the cycle—go, touch, return—has become a fantasy of rupture. The Moon has become routine; Mars, a leap without a net. In this turn, the space dream has ceased to be a mirror of our potential, becoming a mirror of our anxieties: fear of collapse, distrust in collective solutions, the final commodification of hope, and the triumph of monumental narcissism.

The true frontier is no longer returning to Earth from space. It’s deciding whether we recover, here and now, the capacity to think and act as “mankind” in whose name we once decided to look to the stars without renouncing the planet that gives us life. The silence around the verb “return” is not a technical void. It’s the echo of a broken promise.