Luke Jerram

Fly me to the moon.

We won't be singing that in quite the same way once the moon's gone.

There's going to be a sense of shock, disbelief, mourning and grief.

The moon just has so much personal meaning.

It doesn't matter where you are in the world, whether you're in the jungle or you could be in prison.

We're all looking at the same moon.

The other thing is this idea that you can see dark patches in it.

And on this side of the planet...

We often think we see a man in the moon, whereas over in Japan and China, because it's orientated slightly differently, there are all these mythologies and stories about the rabbit in the moon, whereas in New Zealand, the moon's completely upside down from their perspective.

So there's a lovely story about a girl collecting water by moonlight with a pail and a bucket, and the cloud goes across the moon, and she suddenly can't see where she goes.

She stumbles, the water goes on the floor, and then she curses the moon.

And so the moon then abducts her.

So now if you're in New Zealand, you can look at the moon there and you think you see a girl underneath a tree with a bucket.

So we'll lose all that.

Which is a lot, actually.

I think we'd feel even more isolated in the universe if there's nothing out there other than little twinkly things because the moon is this stepping stone into astronomy, into the stars.

So the moon has always been that first thing that astronomers do when you get given a telescope.

You look at the moon.

In fact, it was at the Natural History Museum a few years ago.

It was.