Tag Archives: moon

Lunar Programs: Then and Now, Ours and Theirs

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Forty years ago today, Apollo-7 splashed down in the Pacific after the first manned flight of the Apollo program. (See this blog post for more on the mission.)

That was then, and our mission. As for now, and their mission:

India made the next giant leap in its space program early Wednesday with the launch of the country’s first deep space mission, a probe to circle the moon with science gear from India, Europe and the United States.

(From Spaceflight Now)

The spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, launched last night (in Zulu [Greenwich Mean] time, at 0052 Wednesday).

The probe flew into space aboard a beefed-up Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, a 146-foot-tall rocket originally built to haul Earth observation satellites into orbit.

And now it’s on its way. Congratulations and good luck!

If I ever — no, that’s too negative; make it “when I” — get back to work on my novel of lunar survival, which has been on hold for the past three weeks, I wonder if I can work any of this into it. Probably not, but at least it gets me thinking about it again.

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Some Recent Space and Lunar History

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Five years ago today, the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 mission was launched to the moon. SMART was an acronym for “Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology,” and the spacecraft tested solar electric propulsion technology on its way to the Moon. According to the ESA fact sheet on SMART-1, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit on November 15, 2004 — for those who didn’t know, electric ion thrusters don’t make for a particularly speedy trip — and after a one-year extension the mission ended on 3 September 2006 with a planned lunar impact.

As well as testing new technology, SMART-1 did the first comprehensive inventory of key chemical elements in the lunar surface. It also investigated the theory that the Moon was formed following the violent collision of a smaller planet with Earth, four and a half thousand million years ago.

And hopefully, relying on some of the latest lunar science observations will help make my novel MARE NUBIUM a little more realistic. Time will tell.

Now, back to work on the thing 😉 .

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Progress Report and Space History

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MARE NUBIUM, my novel of lunar colonization and survival, is now 70,000 words long. I have six weeks left if I’m going to finish the thing by Halloween. I need to pick up the pace.

On the space history front, 45 years ago today — September 18, 1963 — the lifting body demonstrator “ASSET-1” (a precursor to the Space Shuttle) flew to an altitude of 35 miles at the Eastern Space & Missile Center. You can read about the ASSET program on this Air Force fact sheet or this Wikipedia page.

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Today in Space History: Great Imagery Lunar Flyby

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As I’m working on MARE NUBIUM, my near-future novel of lunar colonization, I’ve run across some interesting space history items that I thought I’d post from time to time.

Today was the 40th anniversary of the launch of CORONA mission 1968-065A, a KH-4 (“Keyhole”) satellite that launched aboard a Thor rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. (I was stationed at Vandy from 1993-95, and toured one of the Thor launch pads while a student at Undergraduate Space & Missile Training.) According to the National Space Science Data Center, “The spacecraft had the best imagery to date on any KH-4 systems. Bicolor and color infrared experiments were conducted on this mission.”

A year later — and three weeks after Apollo 11 landed on the moon — the Russians launched the Zond-7 spacecraft from Tyuratam, i.e., the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (I spent three weeks at Baikonur in late 2002.) The mission flew by the moon on August 11th and took two sets of photographs, then returned to earth on August 14th.

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Living in a SF World: Cool NASA Video

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Saw this video this morning on Spaceflight Now, taken from 31 million miles away by the Deep Impact spacecraft, of the moon seen orbiting the earth. In the time-lapsed video, the earth rotates and the moon passes between the earth and the spacecraft.

Two versions are posted, a red-green-blue composite and a near-IR-green-blue composite — I think the near-IR version shows off the continents better. When we’re on our way to Mars, we can look back and see this and be amazed.

The Spaceflight Now story is here.

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