Ken Murphy / 2:55 am October 26th, 2010

Welcome everyone to this, the Dodransbicentiquasihebdomadibus Carnival of Space. Dodransbicentiquasihebdomadibus is my bad linguistics and butchered Latin for “175th sort-of-weekly”, and it sets the quasi-silly tone for this week’s Carnival.

We’re always happy to host the Carnival of Space here at Out of the Cradle. I’m Ken, the Lunar Librarian here at OotC,and I’m proud to be hosting the CoS for a seventh time in its ongoing saga, in which OotC has participated since its inception so many Moons ago. Your friendly Lunar Librarian is actively engaged in promoting space exploration and development, both locally in my community, as well as worldwide through the internet.

The Boy Scouts are in the process of doing a periodic update to their Space Exploration merit badge pamphlet. The last major revision was in 2003, and quite a bit has happened since then. The Boy Scouts reach out to organizations relevant to a particular merit badge to help with the updates. Since BSA is headquartered in Irving, TX, plumb in the middle of the D/FW metroplex, they reached out to the North Texas chapter of the National Space Society. This is a particularly delicate update, as it corresponds with the end of the Space Shuttle era, and no one is really sure what is going to come next. How to address that in the merit badge pamphlet falls squarely on the shoulders of yours truly, who is the project lead for the chapter on this one. Our first draft of updates and changes for the next edition was due this last Wednesday, and was delivered on time, which elicited a nice thank you from the Scouts:

“Ken, et al., thank you so much for your detailed review. I think the format you provided is just fantastic. I can see what the proposed changes to requirements are, and you have already provided the information necessary to see those changes through, as well as general updates to the text. This is wonderful!

I am so thankful for your input, everyone. I don’t want to say you all went overboard, but you certainly went above and beyond the call of duty!”

While basking in the afterglow of project well done, the weekend approached, and that meant the Fall UT Arlington Planetarium Astronomy Day. NSS of NT got to co-host this time around (Texas Astronomical Society usually takes the honor), and we had a great time. We set up a play area over in one corner with some toys including our Rocket Ship Adventure playset, which proved to be a big hit. One mother commented that something she likes about space toys is that they’re equally appealing to both boys and girls. Which was proved out throughout the day as both boys and girls engaged their imaginations in creating rocket ship adventures.

We also held another raffle for our Science Fair Scholarship, and had our best single day ever, raising our total for the year to over $250. Several chapter members will go to the Dallas Regional Science & Engineering Fair in February and award a cash scholarship to the best space exploration project. Unfortunately, yours truly doesn’t get to be one of the chapter judges, as I’m already a regular judge in Physics & Astronomy (coming up on my 5th year). I can tell you first hand that people are more than happy to buy lots of raffle tickets when they find out that the money is going to a science fair prize.

And we handed out a lot of space information. Several chapter members had such a good time that they’re going to try to arrange a display at the upcoming Sally Ride Science Festival on October 30th at UT Arlington, which will feature Barbara Morgan. Too bad UTA doesn’t have a SEDS chapter, as then we could really have some fun. One student did approach me at Astronomy Day and asked about student space organizations, so I made sure to point him to the SEDS website. Maybe he’ll be interested enough to go to the annual conference, SpaceVision 2010, coming up November 5th at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Your Lunar Librarian can’t make it this year, as he’s going to be heading to NASA Ames this next weekend for the Space Studies Institute’s Space Manufacturing 14: Critical Technologies for Space Settlement conference on October 30th & 31st. Loaded with top names in the field, it comes at a time when the space industry is trying to define a path forward in building our space capabilities. It’s nice to talk about mining Lunar volatiles, but the fact is that no one has yet written the “Engineering Handbook for the Lunar Environment”, although Peter Eckart’s “Lunar Base Handbook” comes closer than most. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of direction for the next steps forward comes from the conference.

Another exciting conference was this last week’s International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, NM, which looked at things from suborbital to orbital, and featured a keynote from NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, who is notable in part for having been the Executive Director of the National Space Society in the past, an organization working towards people living and working in space. The NewSpace Journal has the roundup of both days. They also have coverage from the Spaceport America dedication that was just up the road.

Further exploring the developments occurrring in the space industry, D Minus Zero shares his experience working on a video for the USAF on “Everyday Sci-Fi” that features XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems.

On the audio side of things, Dr. Livingston over at The Space Show featured this last week an interview with Jason Andrews of Andrews Space, who spoke about brokering secondary payload capacity as a means of getting more science work to orbit. Also touched upon was work on the Google Lunar X Prize.

An example of getting more science payloads to orbit comes to us from Wayne at Kentucky Space, where they are checking over an elegant plant growth two-unit CubeLab designed by students at Valley Christian High in California that should fly early next year to the ISS. Plants in space is something that has fascinated scientists, and kids, for a long time. Plants on the Moon has been an intriguing idea since the tantalizing studies by Dr. Walkinshaw with Lunar regolith back in the 70s.

Speaking of the Google Lunar X Prize, Amanda’s posted a video update of their team summit earlier in the month on the Isle of Man

In the Isle of Man, there are specifically no corporate taxes for space related activities, and as a consequence it has a developing international space industry domiciled there.

Next year the NSS is going to be hosting their 2011 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Huntsville, AL in conjunction with the local HAL-5 chapter. Also in Huntsville is a Google Lunar X Prize team, and the local Huntsville Times has a nice look at the Rocket City Space Pioneers and their efforts.

Space art is almost always a part of the ISDC. Fellow NSS member Jim over at ArtsNova gives us a roundup of various current art contests with space-related themes in Space Art Contests Galore, including NASA Langley’s annual art contest (this year on “The Future of Flight”) and the (now) short-deadline ETSY contest.

This last summer has amply demonstrated that NASA is as much about politics as it is about space, unfortunately. David over at Beyond Apollo shows us that this has pretty much always been the case with his post on “Apollo 15 and Apollo 19 cancellations (1970)“. I don’t have anything good to say about politics, so let’s just leave it at that.

Down in Houston, Louise of A Babe…in the Universe brings us a tale of the sad end of the Outpost Tavern near JSC. It was long the watering hole of astronauts and others from NASA, and it became part of the mythology and folklore of the Shuttle program. The walls were decorated with astronaut photos, memorabilia and a Navy tailhook. It was location for movies including Space Cowboys. It even hosted a few Yuri’s Night celebrations over the years. Its passing serves to further highlight, in the views of some, the nexus of change that we’re currently experiencing in space endeavours, and how the “old ways” have to make way for the new, although the fewer conflagrations that involves the better.

A good kind of conflagration is the fire of a rocket motor. To help spur development of rockets to take crew to orbit once the Shuttle has retired, NASA recently released details for the 2nd round of CCDEV, or Commercial Crew Development. Details can be found here.

Brian over at Next Big Future looks at a project between Darpa and NASA to examine some near term beamed-energy space propulsion (i.e. microwave thermal and electric propulsion). The comments note that the visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky considered such a thing, but the technology just wasn’t there…

Leaving Earth, we travel first to the single most important element for human life - the Sun. It fuels our food and we use both current and stored Solar energy to power our civilization. There’s a new Sunwatcher at work to replace the venerable SOHO. While SOHO was stationed at the Sun-Earth L-1 to have a nice unimpeded view of the Sun for continuous coverage, its replacement, SDO, or Solar Dynamics Observatory, collects so much data that they had to park it in GEO to handle the downlink bandwidth. It is already returning stunning imagery, and Alan over at Cosmic Log provides an example in “Stunner from the [S]un“.

The Sun gets all kinds of visitors from space, as SOHO has shown us over the years. A recent example is Bo Zhou’s comet, which did not survive its close encounter with Sol. From down under, Ian of Astroblog tells us of the sundiving Kruetz comet meeting its end in “…And the Comet goes Crash!“.

Another comet of interest is Hartley 2, which had a (relatively) close approach to Earth recently, although that’s not the end of the story as Alan details in the Cosmic Log: “Comet’s tale isn’t over yet“.

Turning our gaze to a more constant, if inconstant companion, our sister Moon. Long neglected since Apollo days, she has been slowly unveiling delicious secrets under the gaze of many spacecraft from many nations. Anyone who goes to the LEAG and LPSC meetings already knew about stuff like volatilized mercury a year ago. However, it seems to take a bit longer for the news to reach a wider audience, and now that it has it is catching attention all over the place.

Brian over at Next Big Future provides links to various science journal abstracts on the lunar water and other material discoveries in “Science Journal Articles on the detailed detection of Lunar Water, Calcium, Magnesium, Mercury and Silver“. Bottom Line: We need to send robotic rovers to dig around and analyze, assay, and prospect directly.

Dr. Spudis from the Lunar & Planetary Institute has his own blog, The Once & Future Moon” over at the Air & Space Magazine website. He’s in the trenches of current Lunar scientific research, and he gives his personal perspective on the results in “Strange Lunar Brew“.

Speaking of Sally Ride Science, they’re offering an Educator’s Conference in December on the topic of “Explore our Moon” (pdf). I’m thinking about checking this one out to see if it’s any good.

The news has even hit the financial press, where the considerations tend to be focused more on things like capital investments and project implementation, as well as the legal ramifications. The Wall Street Journal addresses the former (sort of, in the comments) in “Moon Not Only Has Water, but Lots of It “, and the latter in “On the Moon, Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Own“. Here at OotC we looked at the subject of Lunar ownership a while back in our review of Virgiliu Pop’s “Who Owns the Moon?“. Even Bloomberg got in on the action.

Your host and Lunar Librarian is very much in favor of the development of Lunar resources. Working in the financial industry, I can see how much of finance is geared towards speculation and value-extraction, and how little of it is geared towards investment and value creation. The microgravity of cislunar space, coupled with the resources available in relative abundance on the vacuum and radiation-bathed lifeless surface of the Moon, offers enormous opportunity for the creation of value. While I know many people personally in the scientific community who are appalled and repelled at the idea of “turning the Moon into a strip mine”, I would rather have the strip mines There instead of Here, and the pragmatic fact is that there are many, many companies that employ scientists for things like resource identification, analysis and extraction. The more commercial activities there are on the Moon, the more opportunities will there be for scientists to go there to conduct research. Or you can wait for Congress to get their act together. I’m just saying…

Tranquility Base Memorial Center by Bill Wright

Still on the scientific frontier of space, Mars continues to be one of the most intensely studied features in the Solar system. While the 2nd-Gen rovers Spirit and Opportunity continue their long trek across the Arean landscape (or not), the 3rd-Gen Mars rover is being assembled as we speak. Over at Cumbrian Sky, Stuart tells us how to watch the Curiosity rover being assembled in real time in “Watch “Curiosity” being built – LIVE!“.

Moving farther afield in our Solar system, Jupiter offers an interesting lesson in moon-making and planetary geology in “Meteorite tea, and the failures of genius“. Chuck, hanging out in the Lounge of the Lab Lemming, relates how tea-time served to solve the mystery of Io’s formation.

Saturn is the hot spot for scientific activity beyond the Belt right now with the ongoing Cassini mission. Emily over at The Planetary Society blog offers us some pretty Cassini pics in “A Rhea flyby and a cloudy Titan with Tethys in color“. The Urban Astronomer, meanwhile, gives us some background about who this Saturn fellow was and why he got the smaller gas giant in “Saturn“.

Looking beyond our Solar system, one of the potential dangers lurking in the uncharted void may be Brown Dwarfs. Dim and not-so-hot, they’re hard but not impossible to find. Steve over at Cheap Astronomy discovers that even brown dwarfs are magnetic and podcasts thusly:

(Just push the play button to listen)

Once we’ve braved the dangers of uncharted inter-stellar space we will discover incredible wonders and new beauties heretofore unimagined. One such vision is a double sunset, and Ian over at the Discovery News blogs discusses how researchers may have found just that, as well as theories of planetary formation (from which to watch said sunsets) in “The Rare Exoplanet with a Double Sunset“.

Bruce over at Weird Sciences takes a detailed look at the current darling of the astrobiology clique, the exoplanet Gliese 581g. Scientists can use the limited data gathered so far to extrapolate things like potential thermal zones and other characteristics that might shape the environment for any potential xenoforms extant on the surface.

Speaking of Xenoforms, there are folks out there that want to actively send messages into the void in the hope that alien life might stumble across it in the background noise and decide to return the call, a Message to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or METI. Bruce looks at some doom and gloom hype associated therewith.

How big is the universe? That’s a good question. It may also be getting bigger. Gianluigi over at Science Backstage takes a look at “The infinite inflation and the end of time“.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the end of this week’s amazing Carnival of Space here at Out of the Cradle. Each week brings exciting new developments of all kinds in the space field, and the Carnival of Space contributors are always there to bring them to you.

The Carnival is always looking for new hosts! If you have a space-themed blog and want to host your own Carnival of Space and put your own spin on it, then drop a line to Fraser over at Universe Today and let him know when you can do it.

The Carnival is always looking for new content and new websites! If you write space-themed articles or blog posts on the internet, be sure to submit one for the next week’s Carnival of Space! Just drop a line to Fraser over at Universe Today and let him know that you want to be added to the weekly call for articles.

Be sure to stop by the Carnival of Space archives! Gathering together all of the past Carnivals of Space in one location, it is a unique resource for educators, homeschoolers, and researchers.

Ken Murphy / 4:33 am October 14th, 2010

“The Next Continent” by Issui Ogawa. Translated from Japanese by Jim Hubbert. Published in 2010 by Haikasoru, it weighs in at 416 pages. No editing errors noted.

The year is 2025. Tae Toenji is a 13-year old college graduate with a plan. Think Doogie Howser but totally precocious. Her grandfather, Sennosuke Toenji, is the head of Eden Leisure Entertainment, a phenomenally successful company that runs resort paradises around the world for a fair price. This gives Tae a certain amount of leverage when it comes to getting her way.

What she wants is a Moon base as a luxury destination for weddings. It’s not as silly an idea as it may first seem. She’s got her reasons, and the bid from Gotoba Engineering & Construction, which specializes in building facilities in impossible places, while pricey is still something that ELE can swing. Tae decides to pay a visit to the Moon to see the Chinese facilities at Kunlun where they are trying to mine Helium-3, though not terribly successfully. She is accompanied by 25-year old Sohya Aomine, who carries her in his lap to help save seat costs. Though the Chinese base is anything but luxurious, Tae has decided to proceed with her vision.

What follows is the story of how that happens. Transportation logistics have to be worked out, and luckily there’s a brilliant Japanese company, Tenryu Galaxy Transport, that has worked out a formula for cermet (ceramic metal) that vastly improves the reusability of rocket motors and allows cutting edge advances like feasible scramjets. A non-descript crater at the Lunar south pole is chosen as the site and christened Eden crater to establish their presence on the Moon. Robots are developed, transport elements shaken out, the crater assayed and site prep begun outside the crater, while back on Earth there are corporate and governmental interests with which to be dealt and Tae travels the world putting out fires.

Facilities have to be established and power supplied. Surfaces graded and equipment to be installed. Design elements have to be considered, and of course there are tragedies. Once the setting shifts to the Moon, risk and danger are ever-present.

This book is an excellently crafted science “faction” tale of private interests setting up shop on the Moon. It’s not action driven, but rather a long rumination on the manifold aspects to be considered in actually establishing a presence on the Moon. There were things I disagreed with, though they were on the philosophical side.

The first instance was in the “wrestling with international treaties” section of the story, when the U.S. (of all countries) drags Japan before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for (of all things) violation of the Moon Treaty. The author ascribes more consideration to the application of the extent to which “custom” would apply in law concerning Lunar activities. In the author’s favor, enough countries have not only signed but also ratified the Moon Treaty so that by its own provisions it is “in force”. My difference lies actually in the application of the Vienna Law of Treaties. By those terms, the Moon Treaty is in effect on those countries who have ratified it, and they have to abide by its terms. What’s interesting, though, is that those countries which have or are conducting Lunar activities have not, for the most part, either signed or ratified the Moon Treaty. Given that custom is best derived from actual practice (as opposed to ivory tower ponderings), how then can the Moon Treaty be held to be customary practice?

The other instance was in the “wrestling with religious authorities” section of the story, wherein the Pope decrees that nothing in the Bible indicates that the Moon has been given to Mankind by G-d, and therefore no Catholic ceremonies performed at “Sixth Continent” would be considered valid. (The Japanese count their continents differently. For ‘Western’ readers that would be “Eighth Continent“) It’s during times of friction with religion that I draw comfort from one of the Psalms of David:

“8:3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

8:4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

8:5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

8:6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet”

Hello! How much clearer can it be? Sure the next section lists a bunch of stuff that made sense for folks of the time. No sense in confusing folks with a pipe dream of going to the Moon and/or stars, which has a far, far longer history in human culture as an unattainable thing. Seriously, though, how much clearer can “have dominion over the works of thy hands” be? Besides, Buzz performed a Catholic [Edit: Not Catholic. Presbyterian? Episcopalian?] ceremony on the Moon already, so a bit of precedent has been established.

So the book is based on lots and lots of real-world considerations that would go into actually building a facility on the Moon. The author has clearly done his homework, and as a result has crafted a powerful tale. The editing is impeccable. I can’t speak to the quality of the translation, as I don’t read Japanese, but the language flowed fine, and turns of phrase are used correctly. I was quite happy to see “fit of pique”, having seen both peek and peak in online commentary and at least one book.

There are a lot of teaching and learning moments in the book. At one point the two protagonists save themselves from a particularly tight spot by working through the mathematics of a Solar eclipse. I highly recommend the book for high schoolers, though it’s really more of a college-age/young adult level book and requires a bit of patience. I also see it as ideal for brighter middle schoolers, as it may spark in interest in any one of the many fields touched upon in the story. It’s fine for older readers, though there may not be enough character development to suit some. Interestingly, though, the focus is more on the relationships between characters, rather than the characters themselves. The climax is climactic,and the denouement opens up a new chapter in the story of humanity.

It’s not a whiz-bang action thriller, though there are some nail-biting moments. Still, I haven’t been this pleased and contented with so solidly good (like, wholesome and meaningful and morally good) a story since “Moonwake“.

As a particularly outstanding example of its genre, “The Next Continent” has definitely earned a Full Moon at perigee rating.

Ken Murphy / 2:56 am October 14th, 2010

Astronaut Snoopy
“Who Knows What Tomorrow Will Bring?”
Ceramic Mug
2010?
Publisher’s Web Site

Librarian’s Note: Sweet! I think I have a new mug for work.

Ken Murphy / 11:01 pm October 9th, 2010

Moebius Models
“The Moon Bus”
2010
Publisher’s Web Site

Librarian’s Note: Now this one is pretty cool. I can’t wait to put it together. About 1/55th scale.

Ken Murphy / 12:41 am October 6th, 2010

I don’t normally blog about NSS of North Texas chapter meetings, but I was under the gun to come up with some program content for the next chapter meeting, and so I pulled something out of my…hat that may be interesting to a broader audience.

“Comics in Space: Graphic Tales of Space Adventure”
Sunday, October 10th
3:30 - 4:30(-ish) pm
Spring Creek BBQ (back room)
Beltline & 183 in Irving, TX
Across 183 from the Irving Mall

Not a ppt, this is a hands-on look at the exploration of space as shown in over 50 years worth of comic books, graphic novels, manga and bandes dessinées. Drawn from the vast archives of the Lunar Library it will touch not only on our Moon and Solar system, but also more speculative imaginings of the vast beyond. It will cover the range from childrens comics to much more mature audiences, from movie adaptations to franchise blow-outs. It’s space adventure as you’ve never seen it before!

P.S., be sure to check out the new NSS of NT website at www.nssofnt.org!

[Update: The talk went well. It was rough around the edges, but it helped me figure out a better approach to take. It’s definitely something I could do at a sci-fi con in the future, although my next project with them is to see about an exhibit at the Frontiers of Flight Museum where I get a whole bunch framed and we cover a whole wall with some 50 - 75 of them, particularly those which offer teaching moments.]

Ken Murphy / 6:04 pm October 2nd, 2010

“The Seventh Landing” written and illustrated by Michael Carroll. Published in 2009 by Springer Science+Business Media, it weighs in at 174 pages all in. About a half-dozen editing errors noted, including the rather unusual “tikonauts” for “taikonauts” (the name for Chinese astronauts, like the Russian cosmonaut or French spationaute).

One way that NASA’s Constellation program was sold to the public was that it would provide a return to the Moon, which became conflated in the media and public’s minds as Constellation = Back to the Moon. Never mind that the rockets were named after the Greek god of war, Ares, better known by his Roman name - Mars. In “The Seventh Landing”, the author attempts to explain the broader context of the Constellation effort, but once again it is couched in terms of a return to the Moon.

The book opens with acknowledgements, a brief background on the author’s extensive background in science writing and space art, and a foreword from the go-to guy for Apollo quotes, John Logsdon. The introduction is subtitled “Doing it Right”, and provides a brief on the transition from Apollo to Constellation and the basic elements of the program. After some inspirational quotes, we dive into the main body of the work.

The first chapter is a summary of what has gone before, from the first robotic probes to crewed missions to the surface of the Moon, with a fair amount of detail on the equipment and crews. The backgrounder takes up the first 20% of the content. The next chapter looks at getting there the second time around. It touches on existing launch vehicles, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles, or EELVs, better know as Delta IV and Atlas V, but through extensive quoting of NASA sources dismisses them as viable, especially when compared with the certain success of the Ares I and Ares V rockets, which the author covers extensively.

So we’re 40% of the way through the book before we start focusing on the Moon. Chapter three looks at Shackleton crater at the Lunar south pole, NASA’s designated baseline go-to site for Lunar return architecture design. The author looks at the various advantages offered by a location at the south pole, although one comment did throw me - “The Moon’s axis is tilted 5 degrees off the Earth-Moon line of sight”.

Orbital mechanics is a tricky thing, a weird combination of geometry and calculus. Basically, the Earth orbits around the Sun and that creates the two dimensional Plane of the Ecliptic. It is called the ecliptic because eclipses only occur when the Moon crosses this plane. Relative to this plane, the Moon’s rotational axis is inclined about 1.5 degrees, or basically straight up and down compared with the Sun. This is what allows for there to be everdark craters at the Lunar poles - the Moon isn’t tilted enough for the Sun to shine down in there.

The Earth is tilted relative to the plane of the ecliptic by about 23.5 degrees. This much greater tilt is what creates the six months of light/dark in the polar reaches. So the two dimensional plane created by the Earth’s equator extended out to infinity, the Equatorial Plane, is inclined 23.5 degrees to the Plane of the Ecliptic.

The two dimensional plane created by the orbit of the Moon around the Earth is inclined a bit over 5 degrees relative to the Ecliptic Plane. Sometimes the orbit is above the Ecliptic Plane, and sometimes below it, which means that relative to the Plane of the Equator that inclination ranges from a max of about 28.5 degrees (23.5 + 5 when above the ecliptic plane), which is about the latitude of Kennedy Space Center which makes it an excellent launch site for direct-to-the-Moon mission architectures and easy launch window calculations, to a min of about 18.5 degrees (23.5 - 5 when below the ecliptic plane). [Edit: corrected the backward ecliptic/equatorial]

Not from the book

Things are further complicated by the fact that “line of sight’ is also a function of where one is on the surface of the Earth. Far northern or southern latitudes have a different view from equatorial locales, and Moon on the eastern horizon offers a different view from the Moon on the western horizon (also known as the ‘librations’ that allow us to peek around the edges)

So the Moon’s axis is tilted X degrees off the Earth-Moon line of sight, where X is a function of where the Moon is in it’s orbit relative to the plane of the equator (23.5 ± 5 degrees relative to the Plane of the Ecliptic) and the Moon’s axial tilt (± 1.5 degrees from the Plane of the Ecliptic) and a fudge factor for where one is on the Earth. Oh, and how far away the Moon is from the Earth, as the about 5% eccentricity in the Moon’s orbit gives it a perigee of about 354,000 km and an apogee of about 404,000 km (only averaging 384,404 km, the number ususally seen for the distance of the Moon).

Then of course you also have to allow for the perturbations which nudge the Moon from where it would be in its orbit in an isolated system. The two biggest perturbers are the Sun and Jupiter, by virtue of their huge masses, but all of the planets have a minor affect, and even the pudginess of the Earth around its middle. Calculations of where the Moon is going to be in its orbit involve over 150 variables. Which only highlights how important a solid knowledge of math is if you want to be into orbital mechanics.

Back to the book, the chapter spends the last half looking at the kinds of spacesuits NASA is thinking about for surface operations. Chapter four looks at the tools that humans will use in their return to the Moon, the robots, as well as basic habitats and sorties out on the surface. Chapter five looks at the scientific rationales for a Lunar return, but doesn’t really go deeply enough into why they’re important.

Why do we want to study the impact record on the Moon? Sure it will give us insight into the history of impacts here on Earth, but we already know that rocks have struck Earth throughout history, so it’s easy to assume that they will continue to strike the Earth in the future.

One example of why we want to study the impact record is to look for cyclicality in the impact record. Why? Well, there’s one scientific theory that in the course of the Sun’s orbit around the galactic core, a trip of roughly some 225 million years, very very roughly, the sun bobs up and down like a carousel horse through the galactic plane and whatever cosmic debris is in that galactic plane. The crater record here on Earth is giving off strong hints of minor big impacts every 30-odd million years, and major big impacts every 60-odd million years. The widely acknowledged (but not yet ‘proven’) dinosaur-killing impact was about 65 million years ago, and the one that gave rise to the dinosaurs was about 4x as long ago at about 250 million years.

So, is there cyclicality in the impact record (and if so, where are we in that cycle?) is a valid scientific question, and upon consideration a reasonably important one. The dynamic processes of Earth make reading the past difficult, while the Moon’s largely static nature has preserved a history of impacts. When we go back to the Moon we can start analysing craters - when they were made, how big they are, what was the impactor made of, and so on, and start filling in the impact record with much better data, and from that derive better scientific theories for the impact history.

Here’s another one - the Sun is vitally important to the health of the Earth. During its functioning, the Sun blows off a constant stream of lighter particles (basically everything up to oxygen in decreasing amounts) into the Solar system called the Solar wind. In the vicinity of Earth these particles either flow around the magnetosphere, or get bound up in the Van Allen belts giving us pretty aurorae. The Moon lacks a global magnetic field, and so the Solar wind goes barreling into the Moon’s surface at full speed and gets trapped in the regolith. These Solar Wind Implanted Elements, or SWIEs, are foreseen as an industrial by-product of things like oxygen-extraction, but they also provide a history of what the Sun’s output was over the course of its history. It will be very important to understand the impact record (see above) to understand which layer of regolith was exposed when to the Sun’s rays, but the benefit will be a much better ‘medical history’ of the single most important factor of life on on Earth.

But the reader doesn’t get that kind of reasoned rationales for the science, they get the usual ’scientists are looking for insights into basic questions’ gloss that has become so common in space books. So even at 20 pages, it’s a rather superficial treatment of the topic.

The last chapter spends the last 20% of the book talking about “THE GOAL”, going to Mars. It covers the history of dreams of travel to the red planet, as well as current rationales. This is followed by an afterword from Chris McKay of NASA Ames, chapter notes, a gallery of some beautiful paintings by the author, a list of all of the Moon missions through Chandrayaan 1, Mars and asteroid/comet missions through Rosetta, and an index.

The book is squarely positioned for the lay person market, and is suitable down to about the middle school level. Overall, I was disappointed in the book, as it could have been so much more.

Like Erik Seedhouse’s “Lunar Outpost“, it focuses too much on the Ares launch vehicles, which dates the book even though it’s fairly fresh off the presses. The book also relies heavily on quotes from NASA people involved with the Constellation program, which at times gave the text the feel of a press release, or a propaganda exercise. For a book about going to the Moon to stay, spending less than 40% of the text on the Moon itself seems a bit disjointed. Why is so much time spent on Mars (1/5th of the text) in a book ostensibly about going to the Moon permanently?

In its favor, the art is wonderful. There are a number of pieces by the author reproduced throughout the book, and I would love to get an original of one for the Lunar Library. Additionally, given the overall educational level most people in the U.S. have regarding space (basically middle school level, unless they took astronomy in college), it is in fact informative and will give a better perspective on the reasons to do Lunar activities.

Ultimately, though, I can’t do better than a half Moon for “The Seventh Landing”.