I dreamed of going to the Moon and one day it was possible. I shared that dream with many of the artists, authors, musicians, and filmmakers whose work I love - and then we shared it with the. Welcome, my name is Samuel Peralta. The Lunar Codex is that dream realized, that dream of going to the Moon through our art. 

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For what is poetry, what is art, but the essence of the human soul?

We started with one poem and a single launch. Now, spread over many missions, we number over 50,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers, with representatives from every single nation on Earth - specifically, 262 countries & territories - and, in addition, 156 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) created 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 Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic Technologies, and others, who manufacture the lunar landers. These launch in turn via rocket platforms such as those 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, 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," a poem in three verses.

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The Voyager Missions 

In 1977, NASA launched a pair of spacecraft to explore the outer planets of the Solar System and interstellar space.

 

Voyager 1 and 2's primary goal was to study Jupiter and Saturn, a task which they completed with numerous discoveries about their moons, rings, and magnetospheres.

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Voyager 2 was then sent on to Uranus and Neptune, and both probes have since become the only human-made objects to venture into interstellar space.  

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Beyond their scientific missions, each spacecraft carried a 12-inch Golden Record with a cover detailing the location of Earth, and directions for playing the record.

 

On the Golden Record itself, selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, is a collection of pictures and sounds of Earth - an archive, a time capsule, a message to any civilization, alien or human, that may in the future come across the spacecraft. 

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The Missions of the Lunar Codex

Inspired by the Voyager Golden Record, the Lunar Codex has set out on its own journey into the future.

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The Lunar Codex project comprises seven time capsules, each launched by a different mission, each voyage undertaken by a different spacecraft.

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Lunar Codex time capsules can be as small as a dime and thinner than aluminum foil, and can archive images and text for hundreds of thousands of cultural artifacts. 

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These archives are enclosed in shielded receptacles maintained by our partners - steel canisters, metal boxes, aluminum pyramids.

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The receptacles are bolted solidly onto the frames

of spacecraft or lunar landers, which are then launched by rockets into space, to the Moon, and beyond.

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Currently no single mission contains all our archives; the Lunar Codex is the sum of all these missions.
 

​​​> The Orion mission carried our payload on a memory chip onboard NASA's first Artemis mission which launched Nov 16, 2022 via NASA's Space Launch System.  Artemis I's Orion spacecraft completed two lunar flybys and entered a distant retrograde orbit for approximately six days. It successfully returned to Earth on Dec 11, 2022.​​​

     This marked the Lunar Codex's first successful launch and lunar orbital mission.

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> The Peregrine mission refers to our payload onboard NASA's Peregrine Mission One by Astrobotic Technology, consisting of analog and digital payloads in three separate DHL MoonBox canisters. The spacecraft launched successfully via a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket on Jan 8, 2024.

     This marked the Lunar Codex's second successful launch.

     The spacecraft experienced an equipment anomaly shortly after launch, which rendered it unable to fully complete its mission. It continued on to reach lunar space then returned to Earth in a controlled re-entry atmospheric burn on Jan 18, 2024. ​​​

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

     On the same mission, one of the cameras on Odysseus - developed by the International Lunar Observatory Association and Canadensys - provided images from the transit to and landing on the Moon. That ILO-X wide-field-of-view camera was named 'Lunar Codex' in honor of our project.​

     The mission launched Feb 15, 2024 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and successfully landed in the region of Malapert A on the Moon on Feb 22, 2024. While it did not manage a completely soft landing, all payloads - including the cultural artifact collection and the 'Lunar Codex' camera - remained intact. This was the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the Moon in over 50 years, and the first-ever private landing. 

     This mission marked the Lunar Codex's third successful launch, and its first successful archival landing.

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> The Serenity mission is associated with our payload launched with our partner LifeShip in a pyramid-shaped receptacle onboard Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander. The spacecraft launched via SpaceX Falcon 9 on Jan 15, 2025, and landed successfully in the vicinity of Mons Latreille on the Moon on Mar 2, 2025, in a perfect soft landing, with all payloads intact and functioning.

     The lander completed all of its scheduled NASA technical and scientific missions without a hitch, and the mission is considered the first-ever completely successful commercial lunar landing.

     This mission marked the Lunar Codex's fourth successful launch, and its second successful archival landing.

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> The Minerva mission was part of a large dataset alongside the non-profit Interstellar Foundation - in which the Lunar Codex is represented on the board of advisors - in a data center on the NASA PRIME-1 launch of Intuitive Machines' Athena lander.

     The mission launched to Earth orbit via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb 26, 2025, and landed successfully in the vicinity of Mons Mouton on the Moon on Mar 6, 2025. While navigational control issues interfered with a completely soft landing, all payloads were delivered intact to the Moon's surface.​​

     This mission marked the Lunar Codex's fifth successful launch, and its third successful archival landing. 

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> The Polaris mission is our mission associated with the launch of Astrobotic Griffin Mission One, scheduled to launch to Earth orbit via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, before proceeding to the Moon.

     The Lunar Codex archive, which includes a collection from the Interstellar Foundation, is onboard two Moonbox receptacles and several AstroGLPH discs, alongside LunARC - a second non-profit organization in which the Lunar Codex is represented on the board of advisors - and other content partners. The mission is targeting Nobile Crater, in the vicinity of the Lunar South Pole.​​​

     If successful, this mission would mark the Lunar Codex's sixth successful launch, and its fourth successful archival landing.

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> The Freya mission is our payload ridesharing with the NASA PRISM launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with our partner LifeShip in a pyramid-shaped  container onboard the AstroForge spacecraft DeepSpaxe-2.

     The spacecraft will separate from NASA's main mission before translunar injection, and surge past the Moon on a trajectory that will take it towards a near-Earth object rendezvous and on to deep space.

     If successful, this mission would mark the Lunar Codex's seventh successful launch, and its first mission to enter deep space.

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The archival missions of the Lunar Codex are part of the most significant placement of contemporary arts on the Moon in over fifty years, indeed one of the most significant collaborative artistic endeavors of a united humanity.

And if Orion was the prelude to the archival missions, Freya is the Codex's epilogue - its attempt to contribute to the Voyager spacecrafts' legacy of humanity seeking to communicate its existence beyond our 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, and associated archival media, 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 these online manifests - accessible via the menu and sub-menu tabs - for Art, Writing, Audio, Video, & More.

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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, from the world.

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No other similar project contains such an expansive representation of humanity.

Indeed the Lunar Codex represents includes 262 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 156 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, as well as from all 13 Canadian provinces and territories. 

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Because of this, the Lunar Codex has been called the most expansive and most truly global cultural heritage project of its kind.

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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 creative 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 About section for details of which individuals and institutions were involved.
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Every creative artist included in the Lunar Codex is either individually named in this website, or referenced as to their source exhibition, catalogue, magazine, collection, or anthology. This is the provenance that their work is part of the project.

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The cultural impact of the Lunar Codex back on Earth has grown beyond our expectations. 

Since 2023, when the New York Times first told our story, the Lunar Codex has been able to put the spotlight on its creative artists in hundreds of news articles, write-ups, radio and television interviews all over the globe.

Besides projects by individual Codex laureates, the project has spawned several collaborative Lunar Codex-focused exhibits in Australia, Poland, the US, Austria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more.

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There have been three major New York auctions by Sotheby's that included concurrently-archived works by the Lunar Codex. Literary celebrations centered around the Codex have been and continue to be held in the US - in Miami, in Texas - in Europe, and in Asia.

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The Lunar Codex has inspired the filming of an independent documentary - "The Art Side of the Moon" - now making the international film festival rounds. The film has won numerous awards, including two people's choice awards.

The Lunar Codex inspired the publication of a premium-format art book called "Manifest for the Moon," collecting selected visual art from our archives.

The Lunar Codex was the subject of the TEDx talk "To the Moon and Beyond," as well as traveling and permanent museum exhibits.

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Not organized or funded by the Lunar Codex, but by scores and scores of inspired creative artists, these milestones are also celebrated in this website.

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Welcome to a cultural exposition like no other - what folks have called the Off-World Expo, the Ultimate Anthology, the Billion-Year Time Capsule, 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.”

- Dr. Samuel Peralta

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