Partly Cloudy, 64°
Houston, we’ve had enough and we’d like to come down now. It was fun hanging out here on the moon for the first little bit, but when we realized you weren’t coming back to get us it became a lot less fun. We’re coming up on fifty years since we’ve seen our families.
You left us on the moon! Please let us down from the moon.
We’re tired of wearing these spacesuits. We’re tired of eating only astronaut ice cream. We’re tired of our bones atrophying so much that we can’t even jump high anymore even though it’s the moon. Jumping high was one of the best parts of being on the moon and we can’t even do that anymore.
Look, we laughed when you said that you were going to leave and go back Earth. We thought it was a joke, and a funny one. But when you radioed to Michael Collins to tell him to input the return coordinates, that wasn’t funny anymore. It wasn’t until Michael actually did turn the shuttle around, and we could do nothing but watch the glint of light disappear into the darkness, darkness darker than you can imagine, that we realized you had really forgotten two astronauts on the moon. And the fact that you ignored our desperate pleas for rescue for half a century, well, that just hurt a lot.
Houston, you’ll probably never get to watch the Earth rise from outer space, and let me tell you, it’s a beautiful experience. We’ve seen it every day for years and it still impresses, even though it mostly serves as a reminder that everyone and everything we’ve ever loved is hundreds of thousands of miles away and forever out of reach. It’s very pretty.
We’ve conducted every experiment we were equipped to up here, and every other one we could think of. We started with science experiments, but it turns out it’s only a bunch of rocks and dust up here, so we moved on pretty quickly. Buzz tried to see how high a number he could count up to before he went insane, and he got to four and a half million. It took him nine weeks. Neil tried to find out if staring at your hand long enough makes you sprout another finger, but he found out that it doesn’t. That should prove to you that our mission is finally, finally done and you can come back and get us.
Come on, Houston! We can still hear you on the radio, sending probes to comets and landing rovers on Mars. We heard you constructed an entire space station in space! Apparently that’s more important than getting the first humans ever to walk on the moon back to Earth. What do you guys do in your space station, laugh at the poor fellas you forgot on the moon and you won’t rescue because of “budget cuts” and “Congress”? Probably not that but it’s still so awful that you marooned us in space.
How did you let this happen?
Houston, if what we’ve said hasn’t convinced you to finally buck up and admit your mistake, here’s something that might sweeten the deal. We both agreed that if you get us down from here and back on Earth, alive, mind you, neither of us will say anything about the real reason you sent us here. Oh, you remember, I know you do. Maybe you’ve tried to suppress it but there are plenty of conspiracy theorists out there who’d be frothing at the mouth at the chance to hear the truth. That we went to the moon in order to spy on the Soviets.
How’s the Cold War going, anyway?
