They Hexed the Moon

"Goddess Diana, I do conjure thee, and with uplifted voice to thee I call, that thou shalt never have content nor peace unless we achieve clean stage two separation next launch. I do bind and abjure thee in the name of all the spirits who ascended before us. Laika, Yuri, Judith, Ilan! In nomine matris Babalon, patris Goddardus. NOLE, OLEN, LENO, ELON! Ex TEX usque LIL. Ut supra, sic infra, semper supra!"

The Flight Director finished her energetic recitation and took a few moments to catch her breath.

The end of a spell was always a slightly awkward moment. The assembled coven, drawn from the top personnel of Ostara Orbital LLC, dropped their ritual poses and stood fidgeting and stretching on the concrete as they waited for the FD to stop panting. The wide open expanses of the launch complex meant that her words had failed to echo dramatically, and had instead been swallowed up by the night air (which was dry and moderately warm, promising ideal conditions for the upcoming launch).

Every so often, the Chief Marketing Officer would post to the #ostara-magick-brainstorming Slack channel proposing that rituals should be held in the huge vehicle assembly hangar instead, arguing it would make for "a better vibe", but the idea was always shot down because everyone was pretty sure they needed to be in the open air with a direct view of the Moon.

The end of such a performance felt like it called for a round of applause, but applause wasn't part of the ritual. Besides, the Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion had recently introduced a policy to replace clapping with 'jazz-hands' at all company events, to make them more accessible to employees with anxiety.

Which, in the company's current circumstances, was every employee.

The Flight Director caught her breath and picked up her clipboard to resume her duties as officer of the coven.

"That concludes the main agenda for this Esbat. Next item: any other business."

The Lead Propulsion Engineer immediately raised his hand.

The Flight Director made a show of looking around the circle for a few moments. The rest of the coven avoided her gaze. She rested her clipboard on her ample chest and sighed.

"I see the LPE has his hand up."

For the first five years of Ostara Orbital's short life, the coven had been drawn exclusively from the C suite and department heads. Only the top staff had been trusted with initiation into the space launch startup's dangerous secret: that the company relied, not only on cutting-edge aerospace engineering that knowledgable industry observers sometimes compared to witchcraft, but also on literal witchcraft.

The skinny, bearded and relatively junior Lead Propulsion Engineer's inclusion in the coven had only come about because the new Director of Engineering had turned out to be a devout atheist, and the Chief Product Officer was on maternity leave. The problem of meeting the necessary ritual quorum of thirteen had been solved when the Chief Marketing Officer had overheard the LPE enthusing about the Thelemite occult tradition at a company mini golf outing with an open bar. The LPE had responded enthusiastically to her discreet enquiries.

Oblivious to his marginal status in the coven, the LPE launched into what was obviously a prepared speech:

"As we heard earlier, even if the next test goes smoothly, our critical path to delivering a successful lunar touchdown is still five months at the absolute minimum. And we know that Empyrean has a full launch scheduled next week. And!" At this point, his agitation started to overwhelm his preparation. "And! Black Yonder's public roadmap shows they're going to be ready for a moonshot within the next two months.

"Even if today's, uh, magical working fixes the stage two separation issues, there's no way we're going to win the prize."

(The prize he was referring to was the Lunar Z Prize, a $50 million contest for the first private company to successfully put an autonomous roving vehicle on the Moon's surface. To Ostara's more established competitors, Empyrean and Black Yonder, the size of the prize fund was secondary to the kudos of proving their launch systems could handle a soft touchdown on a target over 200,000 miles away after climbing out of the Earth's gravity well. However, as the plucky new underdog, Ostara lacked those companies' steady income from government contracts and billionaire space tourists. Even the LPE, who didn't much concern himself with grubby matters of commerce, was vaguely aware that, without the cash injection of the Z Prize fund, Ostara would go bust; or worse, be reduced to begging for investment from venture capitalists, who in carrying out their due diligence might stumble across the doings of the coven.)

"So the only way we're going to win this is if we do another, uh, spell of a more, uh, pro-active nature."

The LPE paused (in a way he imagined was dramatic) and polished his glasses on his plaid shirt.

"What exactly are you -" began the Flight Director, at the same time as the Head of DEI loudly exclaimed "No more hexes!"

The Chief Operations Officer, who rarely spoke through his magnificent beard during coven meetings, added "Surely you're not going to propose another hex, are you? Because even if -"

The Chief Marketing Officer, whose confidence and work ethic had landed her on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list a few years earlier, interrupted him.

"He's right! Even if everything goes smoothly for us, there's like no way that Empyrean and BY are both gonna miss. It's like I've been saying, we need to win this to establish our brand as the shiny new hotness. Nobody cares if our tech is like 10% cheaper. That makes us look like a budget option. Nobody is gonna risk their job choosing us over Empyrean. But if we have social proof that we can do something they couldn't do, it makes them look old and busted.

"And I know we agreed that black magic is a last resort, but we know it works. We hexed FAE and it worked!" (Here she was referring to Fujitsu Aerospace Engineering, a key component supplier to the Japanese startup Ryu Rokketo, which had dropped out of competing for the Z Prize the previous year after a mysterious string of guidance failures culminated in the spectacular death of a whale from an unplanned splashdown).

The Chief Operations Officer cleared his throat. "Even if we were to agree to another hex... the issue operationally is one of magical capacity. Maintaining the hex on FAE took all of our spare time for five months. We can't realistically execute on hexing both Empyrean and Black Yonder at once. Even if we tried, we'd have no bandwidth for spells to fix any of our own known issues that aren't easily susceptible to... mundane resolution."

"We're not going to hex Empyrean or Black Yonder," said the Lead Propulsion Engineer. "We're going to hex the Moon."

The Flight Director dropped her clipboard. The COO began to say something that sounded like "Surely" but turned into a coughing fit.

"All we need to do is hex the Moon for a few months so the competing moonshots fail. Then while they're trying to figure out what went wrong, we drop the hex and launch."

The FD found her voice. "Can you even imagine the potential thaumaturgical implications of hexing the Moon? I know you're a 'do what thou wilt' Crowley bro, but... Nobody is more committed to this company than I am, but... You'd be threatening Diana herself!"

"Uhhh, didn't you just like 'bind and abjure' Diana like five minutes ago?" said the CMO.

The Head of DEI sat down heavily on the concrete. She seemed to be having a panic attack. The Head of HR coached her through some breathing exercises and the meeting fell into disorder as the two emerging factions yelled at each other.

The LPE argued for the supremacy of Nuit over Diana; the COO growled about risk management and unknown unknowns, while the CMO demanded the Chief Financial Officer give the coven an impromptu presentation about exactly how long the company could remain in operation with current revenues. The Flight Director tried to adjourn the meeting several times, without success.

A masked man stepped out of the darkness and raised his hand. This was the Chief Executive Officer of Ostara Orbital LLC, who, attending in his role as Devil (or chief) of the coven, had until now been watching the proceedings from outside the circle.

"We do it," he commanded. "We hex the Moon."

***

The week until the next Esbat was packed with heated debate and hasty magical experimentation.

The Flight Director repurposed the computer cluster in the Ostara basement from running fluid dynamics simulations to thaumaturgical calculations.

The LPE sourced an actual piece of the Moon through 'a guy he knew'.

The COO fretted over his Gantt charts and made pointed comments about the lack of actual rocket science that was getting done.

The CMO led her whole department through a three day 'creativity through mindfulness' course designed expressly to harvest their mana and store it in a moonstone sphere strategically placed on the roof above Conference Room A.

The Head of DEI posted a lot of articles about how white men like John Dee and Aleister Crowley had appropriated and perverted women's magical knowledge to the coven's Slack channels, until the CEO called her in for a quick chat.

The LPE messaged the CMO on Slack: "thx for backing me on this. i rly think it's the only way to save this company. let's get a drink when this is all over?"

She replied with an emoji conveying skepticism.

***

When the time for the ritual came, it was even more awkward than usual. The incantation prescribed by the computer cluster was 900 words of pure Enochian, with the odd Latin phrase and invocations of Diana, Hecate and Nyx. The FD had to read it from her clipboard, speaking slowly to avoid tripping over the unfamiliar words.

"Fam filgisch larvouch. Xanpa phaphingeth. Qnabazeb vil pvdar!" she concluded.

Nothing visible happened. The lunar rock, mounted on a retort stand at the precise center of the ritual circle, didn't glow or crumble to dust. The moonstone sphere below it looked just as opalescent as always. The Moon above them didn't swirl with mystical lights or turn a deep, ominous red.

The LPE had toyed with the idea of saying something dramatic at this point, like "It is done", or a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, but in the end the FD just introduced the next agenda item about which Key Performance Indicators they would use to track the results of the hex.

***

At first it seemed like it had worked.

Empyrean's launch was first delayed by a freak hailstorm. The second launch succeeded, but then the company's Egret 3 trans-lunar delivery vehicle spewed all its liquid hydrogen propellant into space during a course correction, and shot past the Moon into the outer Solar System.

Black Yonder's first two launch attempts were scrubbed due to a freak locust swarm and a freak earth tremor. Its Armstrong-2 lander finally made it all the way to the Moon, before crashing into the surface for unknown reasons. The last five minutes of telemetry returned from the craft were strings of seemingly meaningless numbers, although a few experts in gematria claimed to find them highly meaningful.

There were a few side effects. Tides around the world were freakishly high for a week, then settled into new patterns, requiring tide tables to be rewritten. Baffled oceanologists and geophysicists variously blamed shifting mass within the Moon's core, powerful new suboceanic currents or even a tiny black hole orbiting the Earth.

Rates of household accidents of all kinds spiked dramatically within a hundred miles of the Ostara HQ. No epidemiologist did the required analysis to work out that people with their Moon in Virgo had simply become unlucky.

The real problem became apparent when (after a hectic five months of rocket science) it came time to lift the hex and shoot for the Moon. The Flight Director pronounced another 900 words of Enochian, and this time the elated coven couldn't restrain themselves from whooping, and even clapping in contravention of company policy.

The next day, Ostara's launch attempt was scrubbed due to a freak tornado that narrowly missed the launch complex and dumped hundreds of dead fish and birds all over the local roads. They were well into the final countdown for the second attempt when a meteor landed a hundred yards away from the launch complex, shattering windows and shaking the support tower so much that an automated system concluded the Beltane-7 rocket had become unstable, and cancelled the launch sequence.

The emergency coven meeting that night was somber.

"Statistically, it's surely clear that the hex is still in effect," said the COO.

"It's worse than that. Take a look at this!" The Flight Director had rigged up a projector to show slides on the side of a nearby blast wall. "I analysed the ritual objects we used for the original hex. Their mana levels are nearly as high as before the ritual.

"We took the freak launch problems as confirmation that the hex had worked. But we never actually hexed the Moon. We just made Her angry."

The Lead Propulsion Engineer was the first to put it together. Head in hands, he moaned "Angry with everyone on Earth. Not just mad at us, mad at humanity."

"So every moonshot failed. And every moonshot from now on is going to fail?" said the Chief Marketing Officer. "The Z Foundation also has a prize for undersea exploration. Maybe we could pivot to submersibles?"

"The end of lunar exploration; without the Moon as a staging post, maybe the end of human expansion into the Solar System! And it's all my fault." The LPE tugged violently at his tangled hair, unkempt after months of a 996 working schedule.

"I knew this was a bad idea, but - we all went along with it. Maybe the Moon will calm down..." offered the Head of DEI, her manner surprisingly kind under the circumstances.

"After decades, or centuries, maybe. She's 4.5 billion years old. Time can't pass for Her the way it does for us. Mankind can't wait that long to colonise Mars. I am become Death."

The Head of DEI opened her mouth to point out that the LPE had made two separate breaches of the company's inclusive language policy, but thought better of it.

The Flight Director scanned her clipboard as if there could be an answer there. "Maybe there's some way to apologise. Make amends."

"We could send Her a ... gift?" said the CMO.

"Well, it's surely going to take more than a muffin basket."

The Chief Executive Officer (and Devil) spoke up: "There's only one way to atone for this."

He stepped into the circle and removed his mask.

"Not a gift, but a sacrifice."

The CEO had always looked young for a man in his sixties. He'd often joked in his brief speeches at the company parties that "Black don't crack". But now he looked like an old man, older even than his years.

"It should be me -" blurted the LPE.

"No. As the Chief Executive Officer of this company, I am ultimately responsible. I will go, if She will permit it."

***

Of course, Ostara was far too early in its roadmap to have a spacesuit program, and there was no way to obtain a suit without a lot of embarrassing explanations that the rest of the aerospace industry wouldn't believe anyway.

So the CEO died shortly after the Beltane-7 left the stratosphere, curled up inside the Cauldron lander in the bay that would have housed the robotic rover.

The Cauldron made a perfect touchdown, delivering the CEO's corpse to the cold, silent, magnificent desolation of the eastern shore of the Sea of Tranquility.

***

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AUSTIN, TEXAS 10th May 2026

Ostara Orbital LLC Announces Near Miss In Lunar Z Prize Contest

Ostara Orbital's shot for the moon ended in a successful precision landing, validating the cutting edge Beltane-7 heavy lifter and Cauldron lander technologies. The deployment of the Kelpie rover was unable to proceed as planned due to a malfunction of the Cauldron hatch system.

The successful soft landing is a first in the race to claim the Z Prize, and wins Ostara a $20 million Milestone Award.

Ostara's CEO, Charles Woods Jr., commented "This stunning achievement puts Ostara in a great position to secure new revenues and sets up a bright, shining future for the company. We at Ostara all hope that this will bring an end to the recent run of bad luck for lunar pioneers!"

Mr Woods also announced that he would be stepping down as CEO to spend more time with his elderly mother.