Why is there a flag on the moon?

And before you rush to say, "Because an astronaut put it there," don't you think it's a little strange?

I mean, if flags are the symbols of nations, then why bother putting one up on the moon where there are no nations or people?

But outside of providing the inspiration for the MTV moon man and iconic pictures of astronauts bouncing across the moon's surface while they plant the flag into lunar soil, why did a flag, let alone six U.S. flags, need to go into space at all?

And that's not counting flags sent to the moon by the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, and the European Space Agency.

Today, I'm going to dive into the history of why nations plant flags, why this performative gesture has been repeated so many times, and how the Stars and Stripes became a historic part of space travel.

[upbeat music] Even though planting a flag on the moon may be one of the showiest and most memorable versions of a ceremonial flag raising, the history of jamming decorated fabric on poles into the ground dates back a few thousand years.

But many of the modern national flags that we know and use today date back to around the 17th century.

Although some countries had national flags before the 17th century, they were all eventually replaced by newer versions.

National flags are meant to symbolize nations, their subjects, and their governments, and in the race for longevity, Denmark is in the lead with the oldest continuously used national flag, dating back to 1625, according to the "Guinness Book of World Records."

Other nations with particularly old, although not continuously used, national flags, include Japan, Spain, the UK, and Latvia.

But national flags aren't the only flag game in town, or the world.

Flags with the seals and insignia of individual rulers, armies, private enterprises, and generational dynasties or houses stretch back thousands of years before the 17th century, and their meanings have varied over time.

Because while flags often represent authority, they've had a couple of adjacent uses.

For example, military flags can carry certain meanings to communicate the actions of troops, like waving a white flag to indicate defeat.

And raising or lowering a flag can serve as a sign of ownership over a place or can be an indication of mourning and loss.

You might be familiar with the metaphor of waving a white flag instead of saying "I give up," or describing something as "flying at half-mast or half-staff" instead of saying it's deflated or subdued.

But there's one other crucial function of flags that ties together their military, national, and governmental histories, and this will bring us to why there's an American flag up on the moon.

Because they definitely weren't admitting defeat by putting one up there.

Western European colonial expansion began with Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492, which was funded by the Spanish monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon.

What followed was a period of rapid colonial expansion, mostly by ship, that stretched through the 16th century until the late 19th century.

In the intervening years, ships, largely from Western Europe, made territorial claims on many parts of the world, but the struggle for ownership didn't move forward smoothly as monarchs faced hearty resistance on all sides.

People who were indigenous to the regions that were subject to colonial rule were understandably defiant.

These regions included the Americas and Caribbean, Australia and the Pacific, and the Asian and African continents.

They took issue with the incoming colonizers who looked to subjugate or exterminate their people while reaping unparalleled financial rewards.

Colonial powers also faced extreme competition from rulers of other nations who looked to set up their own regimes, even in places that had already been colonized.

In the midst of brutal and violent conflict, along with the mass migration of colonial settlers from Western Europe to the rest of the world, primarily by sailing ships, the symbolism of the flag took on heightened meaning.

Flags were meant to imbue colonial conquerors with the authority of the monarchs sponsoring their voyages, and monarchs who professed belief in "divine right," or absolute power handed down to them from God, said that these were symbols of their houses and not to be questioned.

But symbols and signs don't carry universal meanings.

They're reliant on the shared understanding of the folks who create them, as well as those who are reading them, and often, the people who already inhabited the regions being colonized weren't given an option for refusal.

Take, for example, the Spanish Requerimiento of 1513, a document that conquistadors would read aloud to native people when they arrived to colonize South America.

They would raise the flag, either literally or metaphorically, and read the document, which claimed they had unlimited God-given authority under the Spanish crown to rule all of the lands and people they encountered, and that if anyone resisted, they were also authorized under papal law to take violent action against indigenous people.

But the document was either read in Spanish or Latin, often with no translators.

Sometimes no native people were present to even hear the pronouncement.

As a result, it functioned as a completely empty symbolic gesture to justify later territorial claims.

But before I started sounding like a real vexillologist, or someone who specializes in the study of flags, let's pivot back to the moon, because by the time the Space Race really took off in the mid 20th century, imperial powers had run out of corners of the world to plant metaphorical flags in, so the precedents of colonial practices were redirected away from the ships that sailed the ocean blue to the ones that sailed to space.

Fifty years ago, when the U.S. was preparing for the first manned lunar landing, nations around the world were riveted by the Space Race taking place, largely between the Soviet Union and the U.S. And although we often like to believe that science operates completely separately from the peccadillos of human emotion, it doesn't, because science is performed by humans, meaning it's also susceptible to our irrational and emotional whims.

As Apollo 11 launched American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin toward the first successful manned lunar landing in 1969, the flight also carried aboard a small surprise stash.

It was a kit known as the Lunar Flag Assembly that carried a U.S. flag and the necessary parts to plant it into lunar soil.

And according to Tom Moser, one of the NASA engineers responsible for sending that flag kit to space, it was not a military Department of Defense secret.

It was just, politically, we didn't want the word out before the event happened.

But why?

Well, that brings us back around to the human aspects of scientific discovery.

The excitement of space exploration, coupled with the heated competition between nations to be the first to lay claim outside of Earth, was evident from the earliest days of the Space Race, and the claims were for celestial bodies rather than discrete bodies of land down here on boring old regular Earth.

The fight to lay claim to space before other competing powers became so acute that on January 27th, 1967, certain members of the United Nations signed this mouthful of a treaty called, the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, or also known as the Outer Space Treaty, for short.

According to the U.S. Department of State's website, the treaty had very colonial purposes in mind.

It notes, "The Outer Space Treaty, as it is known, "was the second of the so-called non-armament treaties.

"Its concepts and some of its provisions were modeled "on its predecessor, the Antarctic Treaty.

"Like that Treaty, it sought to prevent a new form "of colonial competition, "and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause."

The treaty itself outlines a few key principles for future space exploration.

First, space is the domain of all mankind, regardless of nation.

Second, no nation can lay territorial claim to space.

And third, space exploration should be taken up for the good of all mankind, and not to benefit the interest of individual nations.

So the first American flag planted on the moon, which was framed by the U.S. as a humanitarian gesture of goodwill, was also a way to squeak around the rules.

Instead of a new form of colonial competition, it maintained old symbols of domination, and getting that flag up there wasn't exactly as light and bouncy as an astronaut jumping across the moon's surface.

It was also something of a logistical and technical puzzle to solve.

Work began about three months before the scheduled launch of Apollo 11, and NASA's engineers worked to make sure the flag was lightweight and small enough to get to space.

So they relied on a telescoping pole that could be collapsed, and the whole thing only weighed about nine pounds, seven ounces.

And once Aldrin and Armstrong arrived on the moon, they struggled at first to plant the pole into lunar soil.

But after it was finally up, it created an image that's lasted forever in our minds.

But the last of the technical challenges of the first lunar flag is that it couldn't exactly fulfill the line from the U.S. national anthem about a waving star-spangled banner.

And that's because without any wind on the moon, there's nothing to create that effect of blowing in the wind.

Instead, some speculate that the almost rippled effect of the flag was caused by a horizontal telescoping arm not being extended all the way by those early astronauts.

And according to NASA's website, later crews intentionally left the rod partially retracted to recreate the waving effect of this first flag.

Today, six US flags have been planted on the moon, although the state that they're in remains a bit contested.

Buzz Aldrin claims that he saw the first flag get knocked over, possibly by ignition gases from the lunar liftoff.

Others think that the natural progression of time and exposure to extreme conditions have probably left the flags discolored, bleached, severely damaged, or destroyed.

So they could still be up there, but unrecognizable as American flags, which kind of makes me wonder about the fragility of national symbols.

Although they're meant to demonstrate longevity, more often than not, the symbols of power are just as fallible as the humans who create them.

Today, the image of the first flag on the moon continues to carry the huge symbolic weight of national pride and conquest, even though they don't exist in the same form as when humans first stuck them up there.

And just like those nylon, manmade flags that made it to space, symbols only exist to serve the purpose of our collective imagination rather than as definitive evidence of the things that we're hoping to achieve.

But don't count out the value of national myths just yet.

In 2011, Mr. Moser sold scraps of the fabric that he had saved from the original lunar flag through an auction house for $45,000.

Although the pieces were trimmed from the flag before it even went into orbit, the sustained value of these otherwise unremarkable scraps of nylon serves as evidence that this patriotic and colonial symbol still carries abstract and concrete value in the public's minds.