Tag Archives: Moon

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Obama budgets for moonshot

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Space Shuttle Endeavour launchingWell, at least one sector of the web is in a cheery mood at the moment – the space buffs are pretty stoked that President Obama’s budget includes a nice boost for NASA:

The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush’s plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020.

Good news for extropians and forward-thinkers, then – though it’s almost surprising to see a spending increase on something that, by definition, doesn’t garner immediate tangible results at home. Perhaps Obama”s  gang are thinking that this is the ideal time to sneak by a budget increase that might otherwise cause much angst and wailing; US$19billion may sound like a lot, but it’s a tiny fragment of that bailout package… [image by jurvetson]

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Solar eclipse ‘diamond ring’ as seen from the moon

A little snippet of space-pr0n for ya; last week, the Japanese SELENE/Kaguya lunar orbiter probe shot some video footage of the Earth passing between the Moon and the Sun.

The ‘diamond ring’ effect is only ever seen on Earth on the rare occasion that we witness a total solar eclipse; this is probably the easiest way to see something otherwise incredibly rare (and mind-expandingly awesome, as far as I’m concerned). [via PinkTentacle]

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The Lunar landgrab – who owns the Moon, anyway?

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the moonAfter a few decades of relative hiatus, there’s been a distinct increase of traffic around the Moon of late, and that has legal types scenting potential work in the offing. Once we start colonising our sister satellite – whether in person or via robot proxies – how do we decide who the territory belongs to?

Luckily for us, one Virgiliu Pop is already on the case. He’s a research specialist at the Romanian Space Agency (Romania has a space agency? Who knew?) who has been looking into the laws that might, by precedent, affect lunar settlements… and he reckons it’s rugged individualism and the pioneer spirit that will win the day:

“Homesteading is likely to transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th Century United States,” he said. “Space is indeed a new frontier calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights.”

As many empires have learned the hard way, maintaining control over distant colonies is no easy trick – and when the colony is at the other end of a steep gravity well, that’s only going to be more true. Anyone fancy a sweepstake on the period between first Lunar colony and first colonial secession? [image by jurvetson]

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Shooting the moon

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An artist's impression of MoonliteSpace scientists have come up with a novel way of studying the moon (and possibly later other satellites like Europa). Scientist Sir Martin Sweeting’s Moonlite experiment plans to launch a satellite to orbit the moon. Once in orbit, the satellite would fire four dart-like missiles at the moon’s surface, penetrating three or four metres to study the composition beneath the ground.

Planned for a launch in 2013, the project has had recent tests of the high powered darts in South Wales prove very successful. The subterranean probes are hoped to provide details on the heat flow, seismic activity and water components of our closest astronomical friend.

Meanwhile, the most recent astronomical mission is having problems with its own studies of extraterrestrial soil. The Phoenix lander is struggling to sift the clumpy Martian soil to small enough pieces to study in its compact detectors. The robotic lander is resorting to shaking and sprinkling soil samples with its robotic arm to get material small enough to study.

[picture by SSTL and story via BBC]