from pwbmspac
Happy Moon Day.
Lets reflect upon this annual memorial to the Apollo astronauts lunar landing, summer 1969.
If their have been any further instances of contemporary Terrestrial human piloted travels spaceward beyond earth orbit (small or large scale), such remained officially unpublished in the open literature – – although rumored to occur.
In the time since the original 1969 Moon Day there have been several private sector initiative toward replicating the summer 1969 event.
One of them was the Artemis Society. Yet another has been investigating means to incorporate the moon into a destination option for the space tourism business.
In an overview, website site http://www.asi.org/adb/01/basic-overview.html states, “Our primary goal is to establish a permanent, self-supporting exploration base on the moon. From this initial base, we will explore the moon to find the best sites for lunar mining operations, and for a permanent lunar community. Along the way, we begin commercial flights to the moon. At first these will be expedition-class flights for rugged explorers, the sort of trip that will appeal to folks who enjoy safaris, climbing mountains, and spelunking hidden caves. Eventually, the lunar tourism industry will grow into luxury-class trips on large spaceliners.”
Another effort aims directly at private space tourism with lunar destination as an objective. Preliminary work focused upon enticing some initial subscriptions from those interested in being future travelers. The concepts consider assembling the transport capabilities starting with hardware ordered from Russian aerospace manufacturers plus use of associated operations centers.
During Summer of May or June of 2013, an article appeared in Aviation Week and Space Technology. It reported a university professor in India is now promoting the idea for a revival in programs aimed toward constructions of in-space platforms to collect solar power for supporting base load electricity needs at Earth surface (SPSS). Others, in this context, point out that employing construction materials mined from lunar surface or asteroids would make any such projects yet more economically productive.
This space economic development product, SSPS, does have merit. USA’s NASA and DOE had such a joint program until it was canceled officially as the 1970’s ended. Lets see if a call for revival of this project catches on.
-pbs-