Moon Machines on Science Channel

Science Channel seems to be my favorite channel to watch on cable. Today, I am watching the program Moon Machines. This series surveys the contributions by the many scientists, engineers, and skilled workers who contributed to the total effort to send twelve astronauts to the Moon’s surface and fourteen other astronauts to lunar orbit. This series provides a lot of archival photos, film, and interviews to support the topic of each show. I am overjoyed by this behind-the-scenes look at how we sought to achieve such a lofty goal before the end of the 1960s. The astronauts, whose lives were on the line, could not have done any of the adventuring that they did without the 400,000 people who enabled the grandest of adventures.

This page provides a summary of the episodes.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Snaps Apollo Landing Sites

Visit this site to see pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the Apollo landing sites. The lunar lander descent stages can be made out, but they are very tiny in the current images. The site says that future images of the landing sites will have a higher resolution, because the LRO had not yet attained its final orbital altitude.

With talk of Helium-3 and valuable mineral deposits on the Moon, a revived/reinvented/altogether new space race is just on the horizon.