Armstrong in Color

Would have been fun to watch this live. Still, it's fascinating watching this on YouTube 43 years later.

And speaking of Armstrong, here's a funny bit at Slate.com in which the author discusses how journalists tried to decipher Armstrong's famous "one small step for man" line. The takeaway: "Forget history, we had to deal with editors." That made me laugh out loud.

Lunar Serendipity

This NASA image is in the public domain.

It's serendipity that NASA's Lunar Reconnassance Orbiter Camera team releasing the most detailed photo of the moon ever the same week the telescope we bought for our soon-to-be 11-year-old arrived via UPS.

When I got a telescope at his age -- and why I didn't hang on to it I'll never know -- the Moon, being the largest object in the nighttime sky, was my first target. I stared that that thing for hours and had NO IDEA what I was looking at, because back then we didn't have spectacular internet-based moon photos and only hand onions to hang on our belts.

So looking at LROC's Flash version of the image here, and contemplating downloading the half-gig image as well, puts me on tenterhooks to get the telescope out and do some looking. Maybe I'll finally be able to see the houses and buildings in Matthew K. Looney's Crater Plato.

Ice on the Moon. Yay!

Red, fresh craters. Green, anomalous craters. All could be frozen swimming pools.

The Moon, it appears, is a very soggy place. Or at least icy.

Measurements from NASA’s Mini-SAR radar on India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter has detected what NASA estimates could be about 600 million metric tons of water ice in permanently-shaded craters near the Moon’s north pole, or so space.com reports.

So not only is this good news for astronauts, who could build a Moon base near one of these craters and use the ice to create water, oxygen, and rocket fuel, but also good news for Santa Claus and his elf and reindeer friends if the ever need to relocate due to global warming or encroaching development.

I love how science keeps reaffirming the educated guesses my favorite science fiction writers made oh fifty or sixty years ago. And I love that NASA cooperated with India on this space probe, saving money while doing demonstrable science that could possibly benefit mankind if we ever get our heads out of our butts long enough to make a space elevator or a vehicle more dependable than the Space Shuttle.

So maybe there’s still a chance for a moon colony, one I could inhabit as a very old man where I could grumble at the kids to stay off my regolith.

This kind of news is also probably freaking out the Moonsters, who don't much like the acidic qualities of water. It's just like discovering toxic waste in shady spots on Earth.

Look at This, Dear Liza, Dear Liza

There's a hole in the moon, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the moon, dear Liza, a hole.

And the boffins think the best thing to fix this hole with would be a moon colony. This just might be the biggest space news to come out of 2010, and it's not even lunch yet.

I'd move there in a nanosecond, if there were room for out-of-shape technical writers in the imagined moon colony. Well, it would take more than that, what with moon inocculations, moon passports, moon boots and that pesky little chore of convincing the wife to move to a place even more barren and desolate than eastern Idaho, but what a trip that would be. And living in a lava tube, just like a lunar caveman. Colony could be established there before the decade is out, if we had a Kennedyesque drive to show up somebody -- maybe the Maldivians, since they're all worried about global warming and are buying up land all over the place to which they can move once the polar ice caps melt. I'd so be there. As a kid, I kind of expected that moon colonies would be very well established by the time 2010 rolled around, so imagine my disappointment.

Why make a moon colony? Why not? Makes more sense to me than another year of "Survivor" or "American Idol," though it'd probably be harder to get the young'uns as excited about living on the moon if they knew Sanjaya wasn't going to be there. That's why I propose: Send me. I'll drag four other human beings with me and they'll love it. Well, probably not, but they'd come with me. And I could be the first inane blogger on the Moon. Wouldn't that be exciting? I'm also well-practiced at writing emergency procedures. Certainly they must anticipate emergencies on the moon. I could help them mitigate the hazards of vacuum, meteorites, and attacks of maraduing rat-bird, there from Swallow Falls to eat the cheese. So you need a guy like me, excited at the prospect of being a moon pioneer, to get others interested. Forget sending teachers and senators and such. Send me. I'll Ray Bradbury them to death and you'll have 50,000 colonists there within twenty years. Of course, you'd better bring a few engineers as well. They're swell guys. I get along with them really well.