Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on the Moon in 1976. The possibility of water on the moon has excited scientists and science fiction fans for decades.
If we ever decide to maintain a human presence on the moon, clear evidence of water will be an important factor in the decision. In recent years, that evidence has begun to mount. The data comes from several sources. First there was the pioneering Clementine mission in 1994, America’s first return to the moon in twenty years. Clementine looked for water by bouncing radio waves off the surface–the returns giving a strong indication that water ice must lie beneath the surface. Then there was the Lunar Prospector which found a signature for water by measuring the amount of neutrons emitted from the surface and which water ought to absorb).
Then there was Galileo’s flyby of the moon on its way to Jupiter, which also found evidence and more recently, the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-I in 2009 which used an infrared camera to spot evidence of water in lunar rocks. Russia Sees Moon Base As Logical Next Step. There’s Something Strange On The Moon.
Photo: Oliver Stein (CC) [disinfo ed.'s note: Jay Weidner, described by Wired as an “authority on the hermetic and alchemical traditions” and “erudite conspiracy hunter,” will be interviewing former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland for Gaiam TV Wednesday, May 16th at 7 p.m.
EST. Here he describes his feelings about Hoagland's work.] I have to tell you from the beginning that I am somewhat prejudiced about the subject of Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA, the bestselling book by Richard C. Amazon Founder Finds Apollo 11 Moon Rocket Engines On Ocean Floor. When NASA's mighty Saturn V rocket launched the historic Apollo 11 mission to land the first men on the moon in 1969, the five powerful engines that powered the booster's first stage dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and were lost forever.
Lost, that is, until now. A private expedition financed by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has discovered the five F-1 rocket engines used to launch Apollo 11 into space on July 16, 1969 and is drawing up plans to retrieve one or more so they can be publicly displayed. "I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor," Bezos wrote in a statement posted to the Bezos Expeditions website.
"We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in - they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. Legacy of Apollo. NASA Moon Photos Snapped By Fourth-Graders In Montana. Paper CD case. [VIDEO] - StumbleUpon. Driving on the Moon: NASA Photos of Lunar Cars. Apollo 11 Moon Landing Site Seen in Unprecedented Detail. Life on Moons: Antarctic Lake Shows How to Find It. No Joke: These Guys Created A Machine For Printing Houses On The Moon. There is very little that’s easy about moon colonization.
One of the bigger problems is setting up our hypothetical future colonists with living quarters. The issue is that it is very expensive to lift things off the ground and throw them into space. The more material you need to send up there, the more prohibitively expensive your problem is. As we’ve noted before this is why robots are surpassing humans in space exploration. But say you absolutely must build a moon colony (maybe you are President-Elect Gingrich).
First, you solve the material transport problem by making the moon base out of the moon itself. Using a technique called contour crafting, they propose sending robots to seed the surface of the moon with the basic infrastructure for a moon base (landing pads, roads, hangars, etc.). Contour crafting is effectively a form of 3-D printing. I’m completely fascinated with the way USC presents contour crafting. On the Moon. USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) have completed their first visualization for their NASA research grant into the potential use of Contour Crafting robotic fabrication technology to build structures on the Moon.
The image here shows a storage space being constructed by a Contour Crafting robot housed on a version of the Athlete rover developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The robot prints the structure layer by layer using lunar concrete composed of regolith from the surface of the Moon. Contour Crafting was invented originally for use on earth by Behrokh Khoshnevis at USC, whose alumni include Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon. It was recently voted one of the top 15 innovations most likely to change the World.