Franklin Chapman
3/28/19
In 1971 astronaut Edgar Mitchell landed on the Moon on Apollo 14. With him, we had a large number of science experiments to do on the Lunar surface. At this time in the Apollo program, the only reason to send humans to the Moon was for scientific experiments. But Edgar Mitchell was taking something else along with him that some people would say is just as important as science. He brought along with him a copy of the King James Bible to leave on the Moon forever. This is the first example of the bible or a holy scripture making its way off the planet, a million miles out into the fast reaches of space to touch down on a gray airless world to be left for the rest of time. A recent example would be Israel’s space probe currently on its way to the Moon. This space probe is highly unusual for many reasons. For one its launch date was a struggle for the Jewish people launching it. In an article from “Religion News Service” titled “For Israeli Lunar Lander, faith provides inspiration and challenges”, author Jack Jenkins gives an overview of the role religion has had in this humble space probe heading to the Moon. First, he talks about how originally the launch date for the space probe called Beresheet was suppose to launch on a Saturday. But for the Jewish religion, Saturday is the Sabbath, and thus Jewish people are not meant to work on that day. Alexander Friedman, who is currently in charge of the mission as we speak said in the article “Because I am religion guy, I am forbidden to work on Saturday…”(Alexander Friedman, Jack Jenkins, paragraph 5). Friedman goes on to say that he and his team had many talks with SpaceX (The company who launched the Beresheet spacecraft on their Falcon 9 rocket) about moving the launch date to a day other than Saturday. And they were able to convince SpaceX to launch on an earlier day. They ended up launching on the Thursday before.
It is a common thing to think that religion and science can not co-exist, or even work together. But if the Beresheet spacecraft actually end up landing on the Moon successfully, not only will it have defied the odds of being the first privately funded spacecraft to land on the Moon. But it will also defy anyone saying that religion and science can work together. Israel is a highly religious country, and it is about to join the ranks of literal superpowers of the world by landing on the Moon. As of today, the only countries that have landed something on the Moon has been China, Russia, and the United States. And now a tiny country from the middle east is about to attempt it. The ability to have both expert scientists working in collaboration with religious leaders is a testament to how our world is constantly changing its view on the interaction of the two.
Work cited“For Israeli Lunar Lander, Faith Provides Inspiration and Challenges.” Religion News Service, 28 Mar. 2019, religionnews.com/2019/03/27/for-israeli-lunar-lander-faith-provides-inspiration-and-challenges/.
contemporaryamericanreligion 
You are absolutely right. Religion and science can co-exist. And bringing this attention to individuals who can easily be argued are the pinnacle of the space movement as individuals of faith is a very powerful rhetorical tool. As someone who is an Astronomy major I often run into the public opinion that what I do cannot be mixed with science. So to have someone else push this idea that these two ideas cannot exist together brings me a sense of happiness. For that I thank you.
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This is very interesting! I have always been able to find connections between science and religion, and I’m a huge believer that they can definitely co-exist. It’s always fascinating to find articles that relate the two. I also hadn’t heard about the Bible being left on the moon, so that was really neat to find out.
Great post!
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This is actually very interesting. In America, we are used to our government working around Christian holidays, but very rarely does it adjust to any other religion. Even the Christain Sabbath is not recognized around the US. People still work on Sundays, usually, those who work service jobs. Those who work office jobs get the weekend off, including Sundays. In the case of your post, people were willing to work around the Jewish Sabbath, a change that does not occur often, especially in the are of science. The world is moving in a more accepting direction.
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Interesting take, maybe some space aliens were converted in the process? Millions of dollars were shelled out to launch a rocket early, but a dime won’t be spared to any opposing religious practices in some countries of the world. Could we also analyze this from a cultural perspective? This situation could represent which world powers have the most power because of their wealth status and how their ability to bridge hostility masks the horrible religious prosecution elsewhere. Its not religion and science that work together, it’s religion and cultural/ financial wealth.
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This was really interesting, it is awesome to see that some religions are embracing space travel. I think in some cases religion and science often have the same goals, “to find truth” and that they just disagree in how they go about finding that truth. I know that the space program often has trouble getting support in their decision to send things into space (primarily people). Its one of the reasons that much of the space exploration is coming from more private sources like SpaceX. It would be really cool to see some religions push for this. Think of how much we could learn about Mars if we could put someone there!
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