I used to think that, someday, I would go to the moon. This is partly because I was born in 1958 and grew up in an era when humanity’s future in the stars seemed as assured as a bleak end on a battered, bruised, and overheated Earth seems today. More specifically, I used to think I would go to the moon because I was told I would go to the moon by a book, titled “You Will Go to the Moon.” And books told the truth, or so I believed when I was six.

Published in 1959, “You Will Go to the Moon” was an early entry in the Beginner Books series that had been launched, in 1957, by Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat.” The authors of this ostensibly more sober title were Mae and Ira Freeman, who specialized in writing about science for children. On the opening spread, the illustrator Robert Patterson, working in a style you might call mid-century Jell-O-ad realism, depicts a well-groomed boy in front of a picture window, staring at a full moon through a small telescope while his parents look on supportively from the living-room sofa, doing their best June and Ward Cleaver. “The moon is up there, far away,” the text begins, uncontroversially, before continuing, “No one has been there yet. But some one will go there soon. Some day you may go there, too.” That naked confidence is impressive, even reckless, given that Sputnik, a scaled-up BB with a radio transmitter, had been launched only two years earlier, and the first manned space flights, bucket rides that lasted only a couple orbits, remained two years off. But here, that “some day” turns out to be the very next page, with the well-groomed boy waving goodbye to Mom and Dad and heading off for the moon. His itinerary is remarkably similar to the moon flight that Stanley Kubrick would portray, nine years later, in “2001: A Space Odyssey”: ascent from the Earth in a sleek rocket to a circular, rotating space station; descent to a lunar base in a lander with flexible, bug-like legs. One difference: the book’s astronauts dress like nineteen-fifties gas-station attendants, and everyone is white and male; Kubrick at least allowed a handful of stewardesses and three female scientists onboard his big-boy space station, though no one of color.

None of that would have occurred to me when I was transfixed by “You Will Go to the Moon” back in 1964 or so. Had I been a more attentive reader, I might have noticed the authors’ hedge in the sentence “Some day you may go there, too”—the way they swapped out the title’s definitive “will” for the provisional “may.” As it happened, twelve white male Americans who were not me would eventually make it to the moon, the first two in July, 1969, and the last two in December, 1972. And to date, that’s it for humans and the moon, a three-and-a-half-year blip in time. So unless the “you” that Beginner Books was addressing was, say, Buzz Aldrin, it was all a big lie.

A page from “You Will Go to the Moon.” Illustration by Robert Patterson

The moon is a less aspirational subject these days, and, as the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission approached, I grew curious how contemporary children’s-book authors reckon with that now distant—old-timey, even—event. How to honor what felt like an epochal achievement but seems, at the moment, like a historical cul de sac, an act of heroism in a literal and figurative vacuum? Sure, there is talk of going back to the moon, and there are scientists who think it’s a good idea, but today’s motives for space exploration seem more nakedly martial and mercenary—Space Force this and investment opportunity that—and less connected to sheer, wide-eyed discovery. It’s true that the space race of the fifties and sixties was a military-industrial throwdown with the Soviet Union, but the feeling of mind-blowing scientific breakthrough was no pretense.

The recently published “My Little Golden Book About the First Moon Landing,” written by Chip Lovitt with illustrations by Bryan Sims, is perhaps the closest analogue among newly published books for “You Will Go to the Moon.” The text begins, “On July 20, 1969, two human beings walked on the Moon for the very first time. It is an amazing story!” Aside from that scrupulously gender-neutral “two human beings,” this is a book that, at first glance, could have been published in the mission’s immediate wake: a basic, straightforward, enthusiastic account. It touches on John F. Kennedy’s challenge, issued in 1961, to land on the moon before decade’s end; supplies some rudimentary information about the rockets and spacecraft involved; quickly introduces the Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins; and recounts their mission with all the brio of a junior-encyclopedia entry.

What is interesting about the book is Sims’s art. His seemingly airbrushed scenes of the astronauts on the lunar surface have a soft, shadowy feel, the moon’s surface and the astronaut’s space suits gently glowing. The atmosphere, to my eyes, is less Tranquility Base than an enchanted forest, like something out of an old fairy tale—which, for twenty-first-century children, it might as well be. Whether that was Sims’s intent or an inadvertent effect of his style, I don’t know, but, on the title page, the spot illustration of a footstep left in the lunar dust looks like a fossil.

There are other new books for kids that grapple more directly with the meaning of the Apollo program. “Rocket to the Moon!,” written and illustrated by Don Brown, is a witty graphic novel for slightly older kids that ends with a look back on Earth from space—seeming to imply that, if nothing else, the program gave us a quarter of a million miles’ worth of perspective on our home planet. Brian Floca’s “Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11,” a wonderful book, from 2009, that has been reissued this year in an expanded edition, ends by striking a similar there’s-no-place-like-home chord, showing us the Apollo 11 capsule splashing down safely in the Pacific, the astronauts returning “back to family, back to friends, to warmth, to light, to trees and blue water.” As a kind of addendum, Floca depicts an anonymous family running through a field—father, daughter, and son, the boy holding a toy rocket. For me, there’s a familiar resonance in that toy: a suggestion that, all these decades later, the moon remains more compelling as a spur to imagination than as an actual destination.

The most graceful evocation of this epiphany that I have found in a book for young people comes from “The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins,” which was written, illustrated, and designed (it includes photos, charts, and documents) by Bea Uusma Schyffert and first published in Sweden, in 1999. It came out in the U.S. a few years later, and was published in paperback earlier this year. It is a story about loneliness as much as triumph; perhaps it makes culturally stereotypical sense that a Scandinavian would want to write about the man who was circling the moon by himself and contemplating his profound isolation while the big show was happening down below. (This is the astronaut movie Ingmar Bergman might have directed.) But I love, in particular, Schyffert’s description of her subject’s post-NASA life: “At night Michael Collins tends to the roses in his garden at the back of his house. The soil smells good. The wind feels warm and humid against his face. He looks up at the yellow disk in the sky and thinks to himself: I have been there. It was beautiful, but compared to Earth it was nothing.”