On January 20, 2025, President Donald J. Trump in his inauguration speech announced:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. . . . Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.
While there is much that can be discussed politically regarding the inauguration speech, the question of going to Mars is quite an interesting point to contemplate. Why? What is the draw? Why go to space at all? Or, rather, why do we desire to go in the first place? To aid our contemplation, let us look historically to a similar presidential announcement. On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech at Rice University announcing that the United States would land men on the moon. Below we see the most known section of that historic presidential speech:
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
The words “to organize” tell us that the efforts of the nation are aimed around something. In President Kennedy’s speech we see the words “because they are hard” and later, “space is there”; in President Trump’s speech, “the next great adventure.” What these quoted words insinuate is that going to the moon, and now Mars, are indeed goods in themselves. The “why” of the activity is explained and justified by the activity itself. Space exploration is identified as a good in itself—something worthy of doing simply for the sake of doing it.
“The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.”
In his lecture with Anselm House, Br. Guy J. Consolmagno, SJ, current director of the Vatican Observatory, calls to our attention this simple fact: “We are the species that has gone to the moon—us, the whole human race.” That matters. Taking his first step on the moon, Neil Armstrong proclaimed, “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong did not restrict the act to himself. Rather, Armstrong recognized that it was mankind that had now taken that first step. St. Thomas Aquinas defines the virtue of magnanimity as the “stretching forth of the mind to great things,” “[striving] to do what is deserving of honor, yet not so as to think much of the honor accorded by man.” It is, then, an excellence of the human person to strive toward great and good feats—to shoot for the stars—and this includes striving to be among them (all the while keeping a close ear to God and his will for us in particular). Space exploration is therefore a very human endeavor. “It’s human to look at the stars and to realize there’s more to life than what’s for lunch. . . . That’s the human soul, the image and likeness of God,” says Br. Guy. Let us now speak of that “more” and begin to see what lies behind our desire to go to space.
Aristotle identifies goodness with being. For a thing to be good means for it to be fully what it is. Thus, a thing is good insofar as it is. Therefore, to encounter being is to encounter the goodness that lies therein. In Scripture we read, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day” (Gen. 1:31). Insofar as outer space is, it is good. What underlies space exploration is thus first understood to be a desire not only to understand it in an intellectual manner—and thereby behold its goodness—but also the desire to encounter that goodness. We want to see it, interact with it. We want to walk on the moon and, soon, Mars. Space exploration thus aims at and is attracted by the goodness of creation. Br. Guy comments, “The climax of the story of creation is the Sabbath where we spend the time to admire what God has done. And if you lose that, then you’ve lost the reason for why you’re doing the science.”
To contemplate a thing in its entirety requires us to understand it as it is. With reference to Genesis 1, we then understand all that is, the entirety of being, as created and therefore as creation. This is the beginning of what Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) calls a “consciousness of creation.” Referencing the seventh day of creation in which God rests (Gen. 2:1–2) in a similar lecture with the Von Hügel Institute, Br. Guy states, “We are called to rest and contemplate God. Contemplating nature is a way to contemplate the Creator. That’s a form of prayer.” It is God who supports, underpins, and sustains the cosmos and its developments.1 Studying space, otherwise known as astronomy, is to study God’s work and thus to contemplate he who created and sustains it. All of being, understood as created, already has a given nature, order, and meaning. All created being speaks of and points us to God, the Creator. Science, to the extent and in the manner its methodology allows, lets us peer further in to see the logos (given nature, the given order) present in creation. Science, indeed, relies on the presence of a given order and pursues its discovery. As John Paul II says in a general audience:
Creatures . . . in a real, though limited and partial way . . . participate in the perfection of God’s absolute fullness. They differ from one another according to the degree of perfection they have received, beginning with inanimate beings. . . . The whole created universe is a multiple, powerful and incessant appeal to proclaim the glory of the Creator. . . . In its totality as well as its parts, the visible and invisible cosmos reflects eternal Wisdom and expresses the inexhaustible love of the Creator.
Studying space, otherwise known as astronomy, is to study God’s work and thus to contemplate he who created and sustains it.
Here, we notice that the word “creatures” includes “inanimate” or nonliving being. This includes the stars, planets such as Mars, galaxies, asteroids, comets, etc. To approach science well is then to first understand that what is being studied is God’s creation and the order created therein. Br. Guy expresses something similar:
I do get asked about science and religion all the time. It comes with the job. . . . I have a hard time sometimes talking to people about the divide because I’ve never experienced the divide, and I don’t know what they’re talking about. It was the nuns that taught me science back in the sixties.
What may come as a surprise to many is that “astronomy has long featured in Christian theology” and was even an expected subject for the medieval scholar to master prior to philosophical and theological studies. Pope Leo XIII described astronomy as “a very noble science” which investigates “those inanimate creatures” and “heavenly bodies,” “which more than all others proclaim[s] the glory of God” and “raises the spirit of mortals to the contemplation of heavenly events.” Pope Pius XI likewise described astronomy as “a study of the heavens . . . sovereign among the sciences . . . a science one might in all truth say is by its nature religious. . . . From no part of Creation does there arise a more eloquent or stronger invitation to prayer and adoration.” Astronomy has also been involved in the worship of God. Pius XI observes that the stars “announced the coming of God to the earth”: “We have seen his star and have come to worship him,” said the three wise men (Matt. 2:1–2). Additionally, astronomy has been used for help “in the placement of holy temples and in the calculation of the date of Easter.” Fittingly, on the then newly inaugurated Specola (Italian for “observatory”) were inscribed the words “Come let us adore God the Creator.”
Looking up to the stars simply evokes wonder: What is the universe? What is its origin? Why is it beautiful and astonishing? What is our place in the cosmos? Subsequent questions arise that are related and contained within that question: What are we? What is our origin? Why is the universe, which includes us, here rather than not? What is the purpose of our existence? Man responds with what Pope Pius XII calls an “investigative spirit.” The human spirit asks “its infinitesimally small senses to discover the face and history of the immense cosmos.” This response of the human spirit stems from its being rational. The rational soul can and wants to know material truth in its entirety. Pope Benedict XVI states that matter is “legible” and has an “inbuilt ‘mathematics.’” We can therefore study not only “measurable phenomena,” engaging in a cosmography, but also a cosmology where we discern the “visible inner logic of the cosmos.” The rational, human soul hungers for truth. This includes what the cosmos is in its greatest and most fundamental sense—the ultimate and eternal truths. We then desire to know the cosmos not only on the material level, but on the philosophical and theological level as well.

Benedict XVI quotes John Paul II, “Scientific truth, which is itself a participation in divine Truth, can help philosophy and theology to understand ever more fully the human person and God’s Revelation about man, a Revelation that is completed and perfected in Jesus Christ.” John Paul II calls us to a “dynamic relationship between theology and science” where each is preserved in integrity, “[drawing] the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.” This relation prevents “a fragmented vision of the world”—theology from becoming a “pseudo-science” and science from becoming “an unconscious theology.” With John Paul II, Benedict XVI looks to Christ and toward the unified vision of the cosmos that includes the physical, metaphysical, and theological:
The Son of man himself epitomizes the earth and Heaven, the Creation and the Creator, the flesh and the Spirit. He is the centre of the cosmos and of history, for in him the Author and his work are united without being confused with each other.
Let us end with Br. Guy’s words on the Catholic basis for doing science:
There is a real universe. It follows laws. It’s worth the effort to learn those laws. We are created creatures, and nature and creation is where we find God (cf. Rom. 1:20). You do science so that you can see the Glory of God, the Creator. . . . We do science as a way of being human.
We look up to the heavens to know creation in its goodness—to know who we are and who God is.
1 Vatican Observatory, The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican, ed. Br. Guy J. Consolmagno (Our Sunday Visitor, 2009), 213.