Oliver Morton - The Moon: A History for the Future

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

J AMES J OYCE , Ulysses

How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon thats so deeply a part of your being that you cant even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

P AUL B OWLES , The Sheltering Sky

Are we going to lunch? Or are we going to the Moon?

R IP VAN R ONKEL , R OBERT A. H EINLEIN AND J AMES OH ANLON , Destination Moon

STRAWBERRY MOON

June 19th 2016, San Mateo County, California

T HE C ALIFORNIA SKY WAS WARM AND BLUE, ITS LIGHT STILL bright but softening. Shadows lengthened across dry grass towards San Francisco Bay as the train trundled south. In London, though, it was four in the morning, and it was in London that I had started my day. I was a third of a planet from home and I was tired.

I had come to Silicon Valley to talk to people about space and technology. In preparation, my head resting against the window of the carriage, I was reading a scientific paper on places where one might site a moonbase. I was not taking in the arguments all that well, but I was impressed by their breadth. The papers Moon was mapped by laser, camera and radar, the shadows in its craters and sunlight on its peaks modelled by computers, its minerals assayed using electromagnetic radiation of every frequencyand neutrons, to boot. The data were as varied in source as in type; some came from Chandrayaan-1, Indias first lunar mission, launched in 2008; some from NASAs Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was launched the following year and had, six years later, sent its handlers a startling 630 terabytes of data. Some were older: from the Soviet Unions Lunokhod rovers, from Americas Apollo landings, from the Lunar Orbiter missions that had paved the way for them.