The moon was a veiled ghost, the deity of time and madness. It pulled the tides, measured out our months and perhaps too the ovulation of woman, the origin of human life itself.

We gave the Moon names, in every culture, and for every season: Harvest Moon, Blue Moon, Strawberry Moon. The Sun has no equivalent adjectival richness. For century after century, we gazed at the Moon and wondered what it was. When John Heywood remarked in his Proverbes of 1546 that “The moon is made of greene cheese” (greene meaning freshly made, not rotten) he was making an ironic comment on human nature: we did not know what the Moon was, but imagining it was an evergreen preoccupation.

The very first Inquisition victims to be burnt as witches worshipped the lunar goddess Madonna Oriente. Where some cultures detected a man in the Moon’s face, others saw a rabbit, a frog, a buffalo. Shelley saw an “orbed maiden”. In Nepal, the dead reside in the Moon. Jack and Jill (who went up the hill) were originally Hijuki and Bil of Norse myth, whose journeys uphill and down are a metaphor for the waxing and waning of the Moon.

The Moon seemed close — so close that a cow might jump over it — but also impossibly distant. The ancients even debated the peculiar proposition that the “Moon is exactly as large as it looks”. The Moon was a metaphor for the unreachable, the virgin Diana in Roman myth, unattainably distant.

In an extraordinary surge of ingenuity, we did reach the Moon in 1969, and walked on it and gathered its dust and rocks. Then, just as suddenly in the scale of human history, like a child abandoning a gift it has long coveted, we discarded the Moon. “The Moon is about as interesting as an old gravel quarry,” remarked the novelist J. G. Ballard. The Moon no longer seemed strange and divine, but a dull, dead stone.

For the past 30 years we have not ventured further than 400 miles from the Earth’s surface. Most of us barely notice the Moon now; indeed, due to light pollution, it is sometimes barely visible. Space travel was born in the fantasies of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and made real by the extravagant creativity of modern science, but once we had walked across it, the Moon ceased to be a source of imaginative inspiration. Since the 1970s space science has concentrated on unmanned robotic probes and orbiting stations more than human exploration and discovery. It seemed that the poet Jack Anderson might have been right: “To set foot on the Moon even once, is to corrupt it utterly.” The Man in the Moon was dead.

But now, it seems, he may be coming back to life. Nasa unveiled plans this week to build a permanent Moon base within 20 years, a stepping stone to Mars, but also a lookout point from which to monitor the Earth. The project is daunting, for the new base will have to generate water, breathable oxygen and perhaps hydrogen rocket fuel, on site, in fantastically harsh conditions. Like every voyage to a new world, it will require untapped reservoirs of intelligence, technology and raw courage.

Putting Man back on the Moon may put the wonder of the Moon back in Man, with incalculable benefits, scientifically and culturally. Exploration is the index of cultural vigour, and every vibrant society has always looked beyond its horizons. Only stagnating cultures stare inward.

The last Moon race helped to create satellites, mobile telephone batteries, inertial guidance and Velcro. The Moon is just three days away, an ideal supply base for voyaging farther into space. The last Moon landings were fuelled by Cold War rivalry, but for the next stage Nasa is looking to pool global knowledge, inviting contributions from China, Russia and Europe. This time around, we come to the Moon not as national colonists but as interplanetary pilgrims, and now we are planning to stay, if our nearest neighbour will accommodate us.

Getting there will be cheap at the price. The Moon mission in the decade after 1962 cost less than the Vietnam War did in any single year: apply that accountancy to the Iraq war, and the trip to the Moon and points beyond looks like a bargain.

Most importantly, by becoming, at last, a multi-planet species, we can look back at our Earth and perhaps understand it better. Four billion years of history in this small corner of the solar system are written in the Moon’s preserved dust; by studying that record we may understand better the evolution of our Sun and the future of our planet. From the Moon, we will be able to monitor our own ice caps and oceans.

This week scientists reported what appeared to be streaks of mineral deposits on the face of Mars, evidence of liquid water, crucial to sustaining life. By working out the fate of water on the red planet we might slow or stop the wreckage of our green one.

Apollo 8’s Jim Lovell once remarked that going to the Moon “makes you realise just what you have got back there on Earth”. That is what exploration means: it is about getting there, and being there, but mostly it is about coming home. As T. S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The Moon is not a god, or a lump of cheese; it is an idea, eons ancient, that we must now rediscover in order to know our own place for the first time.

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