Courtesy: Astrolab

 
 
 

Unfinished (Hope)

In late 2025, the Griffin Mission One (GM1) lander will launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, the historic site used by the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s that first put humans on the moon. Bound for the Moon, the lander is built for a one way trip and has no way back to Earth.

Among its cargo, enclosed within the FLIP lunar rover—set to explore the Moon’s south pole, where water may exist and a new era of lunar exploration could begin—is a project carrying twelve photographs of Earth. Taken over the past 50 years by Apollo astronauts and others, from lunar orbit, or from deep space, these images reshaped how we see ourselves. More than just pictures of a planet, they revealed something essential about the fragile, luminous solitude of life in the vastness of the universe.

Decades later, they are now returning to the Moon, carved into a strip of subminiature (9.2mm) film. Made by human hands, seen by human eyes, and once treasured by its people, they will rest in a quiet place beneath an endless horizon.

On the Moon, these images held in fragile emulsion will begin to fade, gradually and unnoticed, as time breaks their chemical bonds. The substances that fixed the images will weaken, their forms slipping away. On the Moon, where temperatures swing from -173°C to 127°C, this fading may accelerate. This fading is not just a side effect; it is at the heart of the project. It mirrors what happens to all images, stories, and memories. Over time, even what we hold most dear disappears or is forgotten. Yet in this slow vanishing, there is also a gesture of hope: that what fades can still be remembered, and that awareness may outlast the image itself.

These images first showed Earth as it truly is: a small, lone dot, pale in the endless dark. They reminded us that our world can break—that the blue we take for granted is delicate and fleeting. Yet their meaning depends not only on what they show, but on what we choose to see—or refuse to see. This project is dedicated to the future generations who will live with the consequences of what we did and did not do in the coming decades.

The film on the Moon will forget the Earth.

The question is, will we?

 
 
 
 
 

Before the photographs of Earth recorded on film journey to the Moon, light will pass through it in the darkroom—a single beam, a fleeting exposure—drawing its images onto paper as prints in their first and final form. From this, six sets of twelve prints will remain on Earth, one set for each inhabited continent: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and Antarctica. These prints owe their existence to the film, like a child carrying a parent’s memory—gone from reach, yet present in ours, as long as we choose to hold space for it.

On the Moon, the film’s images will fade, their vision of Earth slipping into silence. No hands will cradle them, no eyes will follow their lines. They will dissolve into dust and time, unseen and unmissed.

Yet the prints endure on Earth—echoes of the film’s lost gaze—scattered across the six inhabited continents. How long they will last, no one can say. Like all things, their time is finite. We might try to preserve them, but their meaning lives not in the paper alone—it lives in what we pass on, with or without the prints in hand.

This project is a reminder of the fragility of Earth and of our memories. It is not about sentimentality. It is about responsibility, and above all, about hope.

 
 

Sketch

 
 
 
 

Planned Landing Site at the Moon’s South Pole

 
 
 
 

Gratitude

Xin Florence Zhang
Alfredo Jaar
Carl Sagan
Blue Moon Camera & Machine
Astrobotic Technology
SpaceX
NASA
Roscosmos
Moon Gallery Foundation