Moon Gallery Foundation’s Moon Bound book is a one-cubic-centimetre, hand-bound artists’ book planned for delivery near the Moon’s south pole in late 2026. It contains 49 visual-art, poetry, and prose contributions in seven languages, all responding to the question: “How does the Moon see the Earth?” The project brings together established and emerging contributors that were selected competitively.

Greater Earth was selected to be in the Moon Bound Book

Mission Plan

LifeShip.Inc , a company located in Carlsbad, California has arranged payload space for the Moon Bound book aboard Astrolab’s FLIP rover, which is to be carried to the lunar surface by Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. The rover is intended as a technology demonstrator, while the lunar south pole a location of intense interest because of the discovery of likely substantial reserves of water ice, which can be studied as an archive of solar-system history and can be processed into water, air and rocket fuel. The Moon Bound book alongside other artworks and seeds was integrated into a pyramid-shaped container, created by LifeShip, a company devoted to sending terrestrial materials to space. The assembly of the pyramid was conducted by Ben Haldeman, the founder and CEO of LifeShip.

Astrobotic FLIP Lunar Rover

Cultural Significance

The Moon Gallery foundation describes “Moon Bound” as the first physical book and the first physical anthology of artists’ and writers’ work to be intentionally sent to the Moon. This distinguishes it from microfilm copies of the Bible carried to the Moon and returned to Earth on the Apollo 14 mission and a physical copy of the Bible left on the Lunar Roving Vehicle by astronaut Dave Scott during Apollo 15 (1971). Moon bound is also distinguished from earlier lunar art and archival projects, including Paul Van Hoeydonk ‘s Fallen Astronaut (Apollo 15, 1971), Jeff Koons’s Moon Phases (2024), the  Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library (2024), and the Lunar Codex Archives (2024, 2025).

The project frames the Moon Bound book as an invitation to discuss the cultural, ethical, commercial, scientific, and political dimensions of extending human culture beyond Earth. Its organizers emphasize diverse international voices and sustainable cultural practice in space development.

Project Team

Moon Gallery co-founders Anna Sitnikova and Elizaveta Glukhova organized the project with lead editor Dr. Barbara Brownie, assistant texts editor Christopher Cokinos, and curator Luis Bernardo Guzmán. The miniature Moon Bound artists’ book was made and hand-bound by Evan Lorenzen, a Colorado illustrator and specialist in miniature bookmaking. He designed, printed, folded, and hand-stitched the 80-page volume to fit within a roughly 1-cubic-centimeter limit. Moon Gallery Foundation, a Netherlands-based cultural NGO, previously flew a 65-artifact gallery to the International Space Station in 2022 aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply mission.

Exhibitions

The Moon Gallery Foundation plans public events and discussions around the Moon Bound book project including an exhibition in Plovdiv, Bulgaria at the Bishop’s Basilica of Philippopolis (February 23 to May 1, 2026), a presentation at ESA’s Space for Inspiration event in Copenhagen, Denmark (September 1-2, 2026) and MICROMOON an upcoming exhibition in the CAA Águeda Arts Center in Águeda, Portugal from November 28 to December 31, 2026). In addition the the Moon Bound book, other space-in-art works will be exhibited including a video of the Cosmic Dancer on the Mir space station (Arthur Woods, 1993).

Video of the exhibition in Plovdiv, Bulgaria at the Bishop’s Basilica of Philippopolis (February 23 to May 1, 2026)

Curatorial Statement by Luis Bernardo Guzmán:

“Moon Bound Book is a miniature that enacts a dual gesture of exploration: one that reaches outward, toward the vastness of the Moon’s south pole, and another that turns inward, into the boundless terrain of human imagination. Carried aboard Astrolab’s Flip Rover, it will traverse the mute surface of the Moon like the trace of a presence not yet fully revealed—an omen of something quietly unfolding. As a book, it echoes the ancient function of objects designed to carry and transmit stories. But what story does this one hold?Perhaps it tells the tale of a reader yet to come —one standing before a colorless horizon 384,400 kilometers from the memory of Earth. It is also the story of a group of artists in our own time, reaching beyond the known, seeking to forge a language from the darkness of the void, spoken from the vantage point of outer space. The convergence between the physical exploration of reality and the imaginative act opens a pathway toward the remote, in this encounter we are transformed”.