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The public have tended to take a dim view of going to the moon. In 1955, only 9% of Americans said they'd like to go along on the first mission to the moon and, although that figure has climbed over the decades, a majority would still refuse a trip into space.
Earlier this month, a British YouGov poll dug into the reasoning behind this reluctance. "Not interested" was one popular and particularly witless response, along with "there would be no point," "there's nothing to do," and "there are places on earth I want to visit first."
I would also turn down a trip to the moon, but not for these reasons, nor for any of the others prompted by YouGov. My fear is that the moon would drive me mad.
I wouldn't be the first space traveler to lose my mind, at least temporarily. Buzz Aldrin wrote a memoir describing the alcoholism and depression that he suffered in the years following the Apollo 11 mission to what he termed the "magnificent desolation" of the moon. "I'd been to the moon," Mr. Aldrin later said of his postlunar depression, "but what would I do next?"
Mr. Aldrin wasn't the only astronaut who found that the experience left a lasting effect on his mind -- sometimes in the form of depression or substance abuse, sometimes in more unexpected ways. In "Moon Dust," a book published in 2005, journalist Andrew Smith sought out all of the surviving men who had walked on the moon, and wrote of the changes it had wrought in them -- some good, some bad.
Mr. Aldrin's father suggested that his son's misery might have been caused by some disease contracted in space, and that theory may not have been entirely wrong. Space travel doesn't always cause suffering as acute as Mr. Aldrin's, although the breakdown of three of his marriages wasn't unusual among his colleagues. Of the 30 marriages of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, only seven didn't end in divorce. That fact could partly be explained by an overall rise in the American divorce rate in the 1970s and '80s, combined with the inherent difficulties of a high pressure job that demands long periods of separation. But there is also something about space travel itself that causes the kind of psychological destabilization that can imperil relationships back on Earth.
One factor is the "overview effect," a term first coined by author and philosopher Frank White to describe the cognitive shift that many people experience when viewing Earth from space. The effect seems to be more common among astronauts who leave Earth's orbit, and are therefore able to see the entirety of the planet -- "this pendent world" as Milton described it in "Paradise Lost," in an uncanny premonition of how Earth would one day appear to space travelers.
There is something both transcendent and disturbing about this sight, an effect that apparently can't be replicated through photographs. It leaves a person with a sense of oneness with all of humanity, and a profound sense of connection with the rest of the universe, or what Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell described as an "ecstasy of unity." Many astronauts come to understand the experience in Christian terms.
That may have been what Artemis II astronaut Reid Wiseman was describing last week when he spoke to reporters of the "otherworldly" sensation of viewing Earth from space:
Bear in mind that astronauts are an unusually psychologically robust group of people. NASA screens out anyone with a psychiatric disorder, and selects for people who can withstand the stress of space travel. It is difficult therefore to dismiss them as delusional or excessively imaginative.
One tantalizing way of explaining the overview effect is that space travel gives a person access to truths that are normally concealed. During a 2012 mission on the International Space Station, astronaut Donald Pettit described apparent hallucinations, experienced as "flashes in my eyes, like luminous dancing fairies." Some of the Apollo astronauts also reported similar streaks of light. Investigators found that the astronauts were seeing cosmic rays. It turned out that these weren't hallucinations, but glimpses of something real.
John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit Earth, said of the experience that "to look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is to me impossible." The psychological effects of seeing Earth from space can be disturbing, or even destructive. That doesn't mean that the spiritual insights gleaned from space travel are false.
Ms. Perry is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.