The Smallest Statue on the Moon

Before he ever boarded a rocket, David Scott sat down to dinner with a Belgian artist named Paul Van Hoeydonck. The two men struck an agreement that night, though what exactly they agreed to would later become a matter of dispute. Scott wanted something small to carry with him to the Moon, a private memorial to the astronauts and cosmonauts who had died pushing humanity toward the stars. Van Hoeydonck, a painter and printmaker, would make the piece.

Scott's specifications were precise. The sculpture had to be lightweight yet sturdy enough to survive the Moon's brutal temperature swings. It could not be identifiably male or female, nor tied to any particular ethnicity — a figure meant to stand for everyone. Scott also designed a plaque, separate from the statue, listing fourteen names: eight American astronauts and six Soviet cosmonauts who had died in the pursuit of spaceflight. According to Scott, it was agreed that Van Hoeydonck's name would stay out of the public eye, a safeguard against commercial exploitation of NASA's program. He secured permission from NASA management before the mission and packed the tiny aluminum figure aboard his spacecraft.

Van Hoeydonck remembers it differently. In interviews, including one with the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, he said the statue was meant to represent all of humanity, not specifically the fallen. He claimed he never knew it would become a memorial, that he neither chose nor approved the name 'Fallen Astronaut,' and that he had intended the figure to stand upright on the lunar surface, not lie flat. He also denied ever agreeing to anonymity. Decades later, in 2021, Scott offered yet another account in a document called 'Memorandum for the Record,' stating the figurine was actually designed and fabricated by NASA personnel, based on the simple stick figures used on bathroom signage.

Whatever its true origin, the statue made its journey. On August 2, 1971, near the end of his work on the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott placed Fallen Astronaut on the ground at Hadley Rille, beside the plaque bearing those fourteen names. He photographed the small memorial among the scattered footprints, then said nothing. The astronauts kept it secret through the rest of the mission, waiting until a press conference back on Earth to reveal what they had left behind.

Scott later noted that the plaque was incomplete. Missing were the names of Valentin Bondarenko and Grigori Nelyubov, two Soviet losses hidden from the West by the secrecy surrounding their space program. Also absent were Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut selected for a U.S. military space program, killed in a 1967 training accident, and Michael J. Adams, a test pilot who died flying the X-15 above fifty miles in altitude that same year.