(Image source: Ernie T. Wright/NASA/CNN)

In late December 2023, President Buu Nygren of the Navajo Nation wrote to NASA and the US Department of Transportation, asking them to delay the spaceflight of Peregrine One, which aimed to deposit 265 titanium capsules containing human ashes (including the partial remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and sci fi patriarch Arthur C. Clarke) onto the Moon. As Nygren explained in his letter, “the Moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours. We view it as a part of our spiritual heritage, an object of reverence and respect. The act of depositing human remains and other materials…on the Moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space.”

In this same letter, Nygren reminded NASA that the Administration had made a commitment to the Navajo Nation in the late 1990s, when they deliberately crashed a Lunar Prospector into the Moon to scatter the remains of astronaut Eugene Shoemaker. Then-President Albert Hale had told NASA, “The moon is revered, and it regulates life cycles, according to Navajo traditions and stories. To send something like that over there is sacrilege.” NASA acknowledged the hurt they caused and sent a delegation to participate in a Talking Circle led by Navajo Nation citizens in Pinon, Arizona. In the end, NASA agreed to consult the Navajo Nation before embarking on potentially controversial endeavors in the future. To Diné (Navajo) Astronautics scholar Alvin Harvey, this 1999 meeting was both healing and productive: “The ceremonial approach co-led by Native American community leaders made room for the hurt felt by the Diné and laid foundations for future collaborations with a shared goal of furthering our connections with the cosmos…turning the incident into a spark of friendship.”

It is therefore understandable, twenty-five years later, that the sitting Navajo president would express dismay and even outrage that NASA had not consulted the Navajo Nation, as they said they would, before approving a mission to release the remains of approximately 250 earthlings onto the moon. It is also understandable that Nygren’s letter would be endorsed by the Coalition of Large Tribes, whose member nations all share these concerns.

In response to this outpouring of Indigenous criticism, however, NASA responded that the mission wasn’t theirs. It was run, they explained, by the United Launch Alliance, with a lunar lander built by a corporation called Astrobotic, to carry, among other things, human remains on behalf of two outer space funeral enterprises called Celestis and Elysium, which charge customers upwards of $13,000 to deliver their loved ones’ ashes to the Moon.

In that same response, NASA conceded that they were sending their own cargo (or “payloads,” in space-speak) on the Peregrine One along with the private, crematorial payloads. Furthermore, NASA had paid Astrobotic $108 million to develop the lander in the first place. But even though NASA insisted that they “take concerns from the Navajo nation very, very seriously,” they also maintained that “NASA has no control over commercial payloads.”

For President Nygren, this lack of control is precisely the point. How did a branch of the U.S. government find itself in the position of relying on private actors over which it has no authority? Why are there no regulations about what corporations can transport into space? As Navajo Nation official Justin Ahasteen wonders, does this lack of control mean that industries can send whatever they want to the moon? Drugs? Hazardous materials? Nuclear byproducts? “We’re saying be respectful,” Ahasteen explains. “We’re turning the moon into a graveyard and we’re turning it into a waste site. At what point are we going to stop and say we need to start protecting the moon as we do the Grand Canyon?”

It is important here to note the strategic move Ahasteen is making. In their letters to NASA, both Navajo Presidents referred to the Moon as “sacred” and “revered.” But Ahasteen changes tactics, appealing not to sacred geographies but to (seemingly) secular conservationism. Why can we not treat the moon, Ahasteen asks, as thoughtfully as we treat national parks?

This tactical shift from sacred space to national parks is most likely a strategic response to the aggressively secular rage directed against the Navajo Nation in the wake of President Nygren’s letter. Torrents of social media posts I will not reproduce warned NASA not to capitulate in the midst of this controversy to the alleged backwardness and superstition of Navajo “religion.” During the week before the launch, I witnessed this same rancor in conversation with a European aeronautics engineer. Irate over what he perceived as an intrusion of “religion” into “science,” he said the Navajo nation had no right to impose their particular “beliefs” on the universal, neutral sphere of outer space.

We find a similar position expressed in numerous interviews with Charles Chafer, CEO and Co-founder of Celestis Memorial Spaceflights. In the weeks before the Peregrine launch, Chafer responded to the Navajo president’s letter by saying, “honestly, while we respect everyone’s beliefs, we do not find Mr. Nygren’s concerns to be compelling.” In another news brief, Chafer said he did not find the Navajo teachings to be “substantive.” In yet another, he said, “I don’t understand why [scattering ashes] on a dead planet is desecration.”

(Engraved flight ashes capsules. Image source: Celestis)

Had he followed the lead of NASA in the late ‘90s, Chafer might have requested a meeting with members of the Navajo community so he could try to understand. But no such conversation has taken place. What Chafer has done instead is to reject the intrusion of what he sees as religion into the allegedly neutral field of interplanetary commerce. As Chafer explained to CNN, “simply put, we do not and never have let religious beliefs dictate humanity’s space efforts.”

Simply put in response, this claim is false. “Humanity’s space efforts” mostly operate according to the so-called “Von Braun Paradigm,” established by the former Nazi rocket scientist who became a born-again Christian in the U.S. and saw space as the next chapter of American evangelism. In Von Braun’s imagination, the same “Manifest Destiny” that had granted European-descended Americans the right to the Western frontier was now calling them out to the stars. When the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the moon a decade later, the astronauts took turns reading from the book of Genesis. When Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface, he ate and drank a pre-consecrated Eucharist.

Such religious intrusions into space are hardly limited to the mid-twentieth century. The sitting U.S. president has on numerous occasions identified Mars as the next site of American “Manifest Destiny.” His former Vice President cited a Psalm to assure the National Space Council that God would follow and bless the U.S. “even if we go up to the heavens.” One might also note that every planet in our solar system except Earth is named after a god or goddess. Likewise, with most of NASA’s missions and those of India and twenty-first century China. Finally, it is no accident that missions are called “missions,” from the Latin missio, the “sending” of Christians to convert non-Christians in unknown lands.

In short, there is nothing not-religious about space. But while some ideas and practices (Manifest Destiny, reading Genesis) are dominant enough to masquerade as secular or simply symbolic, others (“this land is sacred,” Grandmother Moon) strike the industry as too religious. This is also to say they’re the wrong kind of religious.

It is this duplicity between acceptable, almost-invisible religion and unacceptable, too-visible religion that allows Chafer to say, “I don’t want to question anybody’s religious beliefs. But having said that, what [the Navajo Nation is] asking for is basically ownership of the moon for purposes of their sacraments.” Phrasing it this way, Chafer is accusing the Navajo objection to lunar burials with violating the 1957 Outer Space Treaty (OST), which states that no nation can own part or all of an extraterrestrial body. From Chafer’s perspective, it is specifically President Nygren’s “sacramental” assertions that amount to attempted ownership: by saying the Moon is sacred, the Navajo Nation is claiming the Moon for themselves. In this light, it is only by keeping religion out of space that the latter can remain what the OST calls “the province of all mankind.”

This attempt to ban religion from space is curious, if only because Chafer oversees a company dedicated to the ritualistic deposition of human (and in at least one case, canine) remains. On its company website, Celestis pledges to honor “the dream and memory of your departed loved ones by launching a symbolic portion of cremated remains into Earth orbit, onto the lunar surface, or into deep space.” The company’s language of dreaming, of symbolism, and of “departure”—which suggests that the clients’ loved ones have not ceased to exist but have rather moved somewhere else—all operates within a softly spiritual register divorced from any particular tradition but still committed to the ritual commemoration and eternal perdurance of the dead.

Most of the site’s featured testimonials similarly express a conviction that the spaceflights’ “participants” have in some posthumous way experienced spaceflight. As the sibling of one participant attests in a video review, “it was always my brother’s dream to fly into space. If he could have snuck aboard a space shuttle, [or] built his own…he tried in the past….For the common man to be able to go into space…it’s unreal.” Another family member adds that when she heard the countdown before liftoff, she “was just screaming, ‘go, go, go.’” In the care of Celestis, her loved one had finally made it to outer space.

Given all of this rhetoric, it is hard to understand Charles Chafer’s objection to the Navajo Nation’s “claiming” the Moon “for the purposes of their sacraments” when space burial companies are doing the same thing, both physically and rhetorically. Rival company Elysium goes so far as to call their purview “A New Sacred Space for Remembrance.” By what logic can private corporations conduct “just spiritual,” newly emerging, techno-futuristic religious rituals in “sacred” space while insisting it is inappropriate to let religion into space?

As rituals often do, the Peregrine One mission failed. A stream of leaked propellant meant the lander couldn’t land, so the spacecraft returned to Earth, incinerating as it re-entered the atmosphere. In short, the ashes never made it to the Moon. Since they had only sent a few grams of remains on the flight, however, clients received vouchers for “a no-cost reflight” in the future.

And so the debate remains open: does the Navajo Nation have the right to object to such burials? Does private industry have the right to perform them? In a Nature op-ed, Diné engineer Alvin Harvey helps us through this impasse, clarifying that the Navajo objection “is not about ownership of the Moon,” nor is it intended “to enforce Diné religious beliefs.” Rather, he insists, the objection concerns “the right to be consulted, to uphold Native American legal rights, to hold government agencies accountable and to safeguard the Moon for future generations.”

Of course, when Harvey says the objection isn’t “about religion,” he is not denying that it stems from religious convictions and practices. In fact, he begins this op-ed by reaffirming the sacredness of Earth’s only natural satellite and by calling the Moon an “ancient relative,” to whom many Indigenous nations refer as “Grandmother.” But neither he nor President Nygren is asking non-native CEOs or NASA execs to revere the Moon or call her Grandmother (it would be awkward if they did). Rather, they are asking to be consulted so that Native and non-native humans, together, might determine whether scattering ashes and titanium canisters on the Moon amounts to safeguarding it for future generations.

If the Moon and other planetary bodies are, indeed, “the province of all [humanity],” then determining how to behave toward that province is a matter not of conversion but of conversation. Rather than trying to homogenize the species under one worldview, different kinds of humans need to determine how, from their different perspectives, any of us ought to behave toward that shared province. As American space lawyer Michelle Hanlon concedes, “if everyone starts sending stuff up, the Moon is going to get really trashy really fast.” So, “beliefs” notwithstanding, members of vastly different communities might have a shared interest in exercising restraint and thoughtfulness with respect to activities on the Moon. But even beginning such a conversation will require that the spokespeople for “industry”—and even “science”—recognize that they have a perspective in the first place, and that their intentions in outer space are no more universal than those of anybody else.

In other words, the “consultation” NASA has promised the Navajo Nation will remain impossible so long as one side of this debate believes it speaks for “all humanity,” universality, and truth (which is to say “science”) while the other represents tribalism, particularity, and culture (which is to say “religion”). As the Caribbean philosopher and critic Sylvia Wynter has shown, the Euro-Christian imperialism that produces technoscience is just as “local” and “cultural” as the Indigenous teachings it keeps trying to erase. Even as the Celestis CEO insists that “space activities” be free of all religion, his own website prominently features retired astronaut Jon A. McBride praising mourning families for “the wonderful thing that you have done to your loved ones. They truly slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God.”

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Dean of Social Sciences, Professor of Religion, and Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University. Among other books, she is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago, 2021) and co-editor with Lance Gharavi of Cosmic Missions: Religion and Space Exploration (Columbia, forthcoming).