I dreamed of going to the Moon and one day it was possible. I'm sharing that dream with many of the artists, authors, musicians, and filmmakers whose work I love.

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Welcome, my name is Samuel Peralta. The Lunar Codex is that dream realized.

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We started one poet and a single launch. Now, spread over seven missions, we number 40,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, representing 259 countries & territories, and 149 Indigenous nations, in time capsules launching from Earth, to space, to the Moon and beyond.

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​The U.S.'s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a plan, the Artemis Program, to land humans on the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, and to establish a permanent base on the lunar surface.

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In advance, NASA is sending unmanned missions via its Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) Program, with partners including Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic Technologies, and Firefly Aerospace. Their lunar landers launch via rocket platforms by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Along with NASA instruments, these missions will carry commercial payloads, including the time capsules that make up the Lunar Codex. 

On November 16, 2022, the Orion spacecraft launched on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), orbiting the Moon and returning to Earth on December 11, in the first of NASA's Artemis missions.

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For NASA's moon landings this was a prelude, and so too for the Lunar Codex. Along with other payloads, Orion carried a memory drive that included "Three Faces of the Moon," poem in three verses.

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The Seven Missions of the Lunar Codex

All in all, the Lunar Codex comprises seven time capsules, each launched by a different mission. Currently no single mission contains all our archives; the Lunar Codex is the sum of all these missions.
 

​​​> The Orion mission carried our payload onboard NASA's first Artemis mission, orbiting the Moon and returning to Earth.​​​

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> The Peregrine mission refers to our payload onboard NASA's Peregrine Mission One by Astrobotic Technology, consisting of content, both analog and digital, in three separate DHL MoonBox canisters. Targeted for an archival landing but set back by an equipment anomaly, it reached lunar space and, in a controlled re-entry, burned up in Earth's atmosphere. ​​​

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> The Nova mission refers to collection of RGB work on a NanoFiche layer alongside projects from the Long Now, Barrelhand, and StamperTech, as well as content for 674 Lunagrams, part of the Lunaprise disc on Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander.

     Also on the Nova mission, one of the Moon cameras on Odysseus - developed by the International Lunar Observatory Association and Canadensys, which provided images from the transit to and landing on the Moon the camera - is named 'Lunar Codex' in honor of our project.​

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> The Serenity mission is associated with our payload launched alongside partners of the NASA CLPS-TO-19D mission, targeted for a landing in the Mare Crisium region of the Moon.​​

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> The Minerva mission rideshares with the NASA PRIME-1 launch, targeted for a landing in the south pole region of the Moon.​​

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> The Polaris mission is our mission associated with an Astrobotic Griffin launch previously slated to carry NASA's VIPER rover, now carrying an alternate payload, targeting the Nobile Crater, in the vicinity of the Lunar South Pole.​​​

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> The Freya mission is our payload ridesharing with the NASA PRISM launch, separating from NASA's main mission before translunar injection, and surging past the Moon on a trajectory beyond towards a near-Earth object and on to deep space.​​

The archival missions of the Lunar Codex are part of the most significant placement of contemporary arts on the Moon in over fifty years. 

And if Orion was the prelude to the archival missions, Freya is the Codex's epilogue - its attempt to contribute to the Voyager legacy of humanity seeking to communicate its existence beyond our solar system.
 

Inspiring the Present and the Future

At its essence, the Lunar Codex is a set of time capsules, a message-in-a-bottle to future generations.
 

This website, LunarCodex.com, is the documentation of the project. It details the NASA programs that made it possible, associated spacecraft and archival processes, including the unique technologies developed during the project for color and audio preservation and reconstruction.
 

This website also provides a manifest of the journey - a record of the art, writing, music, and film, that the project has curated and collected - and the artists whose works are celebrated and preserved in the Lunar Codex.

Every piece of human creativity in our time capsules is traceable through the manifests.

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The creatives of the Lunar Codex are our representatives from Earth to the Moon and beyond, our ambassadors from this era to the future. They represent creative work from Canada, the U.S., India, China, Australia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates.

Indeed the Lunar Codex represents includes 259 countries and territories from Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Oceania, Asia and the Middle East, and from Antarctica - firsts on the Moon for many of these countries.
 

The Lunar Codex also includes cultural works from artists from at least 149 Indigenous nations from the North American, Eurasian, and Australian continents.

In North America, representative creative artists come from all 50 U.S. states and 3 districts and territories, and from all 13 Canadian provinces and territories. 

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Because of this, the Lunar Codex has been called the most expansive, global, and diverse collection of contemporary culture of its kind.

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It's fitting that, in parallel with Artemis - a program attempting to land the first woman on the Moon - the Lunar Codex is the first project to launch the works of women artists to the lunar surface.

People have also pointed out other firsts, including being the first project to place contemporary film and music on the Moon. It is the first to include work from disabled artists; the work of artisans in wood, clay, bronze, stone, mosaics, cloth; embroidery work, mosaic, inked tattoo work, digital art, spray-painted urban art; and to include poetry from a human-AI collaboration.

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The Museum on the Moon
 

The contemporary cultural focus of the Lunar Codex makes it unique among many other similar, albeit commercially-driven, initiatives.

Not a single artist paid for inclusion in this project. All were curated in by a circle of professional curators, gallerists, editors, and anthologists, all of whom believe in this passion project. See our C&C section for details.

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Every creative artist included in the Lunar Codex is individually named in this website; or we reference their source exhibition, catalogue, magazine, collection, or anthology. This is the provenance that their work is part of the project.

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Welcome to a cultural exposition like no other - what folks have called the "World Expo on the Moon," the "Ultimate Anthology,"  the "Galactic Library," the "Museum on the Moon" - an out-of-this-world celebration of creativity and the human spirit.

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Welcome to the Lunar Codex.

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"Our hope is that future travelers who find these time capsules will discover some of the richness of our world today... It speaks to the idea that, despite wars and pandemics and climate upheaval, humankind found time to create art, found time to dream.”

- Samuel Peralta

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