The moon landing is under appeal

By 2050, every moon landing would be scored, ranked and published on an industry leaderboard, with position deciding launch slots, insurance premiums and dinner seating. The first real test of the scheme would come not from the moon but from a county court, where a freight company would argue that a spacecraft lying on its side has nonetheless arrived.

Since the mid-2020s, private companies have been landing, or attempting to land, spacecraft on the Moon under government contracts that pay for delivered cargo rather than for the vehicle itself. Several of the early commercial landers arrived tilted or on their side, and their operators still described those missions as at least partial successes because some instruments kept working. Meanwhile rankings and leaderboards have spread far beyond sport, into sales teams, app stores, universities, restaurant reviews and corporate sustainability scores, and in many fields a position on a list has real financial consequences. Space agencies increasingly buy services from private operators instead of owning the hardware, which makes the question of what counts as success a commercial one.

Court 4, 10.30 a.m. Ashcombe Lunar Freight Ltd v Lunar Surface Landing Standards Council. Application for interim relief. Applicant seeks restoration to ninth place on the respondent's Landing Leaderboard pending determination of whether a vehicle resting at eighty-one degrees to the lunar surface has, within the meaning of Schedule 2, landed. Time estimate: one day. Not before 11.00. The entry would sit on the daily list between a disputed parking charge and a landlord seeking possession of a flat in Croydon, which is roughly where the moon would by then sit in the legal order of things.

Under the scheme, every landing on the moon would be scored by an industry council and published in a running table, with points for arriving upright, for the first image reaching the ground within the hour, and for the legibility of sponsors' names in that image. Deductions would apply for unplanned contact with the surface at speed, described in the methodology as “lithobraking”. Position on the table would determine landing-slot priority, insurance premiums and the order in which chief executives would be seated at the annual dinner. Ninth place, the council's guidance would note, comes with a table near the kitchen.

Ashcombe's vehicle, the Steadfast 3, would have reached the surface intact, deployed its instruments and transmitted for eleven days, all while lying on its side with one landing leg pointed at the Earth. The council's assessors would have awarded it a landing at first, then withdrawn it after a rival lodged a query with a photograph and a protractor. Ashcombe's position would be that a landing is an event, not a posture. The council's would be that Schedule 2 says upright, and that Schedule 2 was drafted, at some expense, by lawyers who had never left the building.

“I watched the whole thing from the kitchen,” said Denise Whitlow, whose husband would be the mission's flight director. “He came home, said we landed, and I believed him. Then a man with a ruler said we hadn't. He hasn't slept properly since. He keeps tilting the toaster.” Colin Marsh, a retired surveyor who runs a website tallying every landing since 1966, said his own table would count the Steadfast 3. “It's on the moon. It's not going anywhere. That was rather the point of landing.”

The leaderboard would not stop at the corporate level. Several operators would have tied the personal ratings of flight controllers to the table, so that a demotion from ninth to eleventh could reduce a shift supervisor's bonus and move her desk. Insurers would price the next mission against the current position rather than the last one, and a landing that fell out of the top ten could cost more to underwrite than one that had never been attempted. “We were told not to land at all until the appeal was heard,” one engineer said. “The spacecraft was already on the way.”

The rival operator, which the council would decline to name, would be understood to hold eighth place with a lander that arrived upright but failed to open its doors. Its instruments would remain sealed and, as such, in perfect condition. The court would be asked to decide whether Schedule 2 measures achievement or angle, and whether a body that sells rankings can also define the thing it ranks. A judge would set aside one day for the hearing. The vehicle would spend it, as it has spent every day since arrival, lying quietly on its side, transmitting.

A council spokesperson said the leaderboard existed “to give the public a clear picture of who is winning on the moon”, and that the definition of a landing would be reviewed at the next scheduled methodology update, in 2053. Ashcombe's staff would meanwhile continue to describe the mission as a success in every document not filed with the court. The family of the flight director would have framed the first image from the surface. It would show grey dust, a black sky and a sponsor's name, printed upside down, still perfectly legible.