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Lunar tales: The first (imaginative) Moon landings

Atriptothemoon

One such story tells of the journey Lucian and 50 companions take on a boat carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. When they arrive on the lunar surface, they’re greeted by a race of three-headed vultures and soon find themselves in the middle of a war with another species. Eventually they make their way back to Earth and experience more fantastic adventures. Lucian’s lunar tale is the earliest known piece of fiction that depicts space travel, a Moon landing, aliens, and interplanetary war.

Keplersomnium

In the tale, there exists an omnipresent aether that fills the void between Earth and the Moon. It’s very cold, so humans must rely on summoned demons to keep them warm. The human travelers must also plug their noses with damp sponges to help them breathe. The trip is so stressful that they must be put in suspended animation. Kepler’s descriptions of how the Earth would look from the Moon are surprisingly accurate, even by today’s standards. Overall, the science in Somnium is remarkable for its time.

Most subsequent stories about lunar journeys were satires, like George Tucker’s 1827 work: A Voyage to the Moon . But writers also began treating tales of lunar voyages a bit more seriously. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 story, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” was a mix of satire and serious speculative fiction. The imaginative breakthrough came three decades later from the pen of French writer Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), followed by Around the Moon (1870).

In Verne’s work, members of the post-Civil War Baltimore Gun Club use an arguably scientific method — a giant cannon — to shoot their travelers around the Moon. But they don’t land. Instead, they experience a series of misadventures while in orbit around the Moon before eventually making their way back to Earth.

On the other hand, the two protagonists of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon use a “hand-waving science” method of travel. But they actually land on the Moon, explore it, and return. In the story, an eccentric physicist named Cavor plans to land on the Moon in a ship of his own design powered by a metal he invented with antigravity properties called “cavorite.” After enlisting the reluctant help of an English businessman named Bedford, they build a steel sphere with glass windows and sliding cavorite shutters. Sliding these open and closed allows them to “steer” the ship to the Moon.

Off they go, weightlessness on the way. They land safely on the Moon (which has a breathable atmosphere) and explore its surface. They then drunkenly enter the Moon’s underground caverns, where they are promptly captured by insectoid extraterrestrials called Selenites. After more harrowing experiences, the two men escape and make their way back to the lunar surface. They split up, looking for their ship, but Cavor is injured. Bedford reluctantly leaves the Moon, alone. Later, home and safe, Bedford learns that scientists are receiving radio transmissions from Cavor, who is still alive and still trapped in the Moon.

For nearly two millennia, storytellers have devised some ingenious methods to get their characters to the Moon. Here are just a few highlights: • Giant waterspout: True History , Lucian of Samosata, ca. 2nd century AD • A “shadow bridge”: Somnium , Johannes Kepler, 1634 • Multi-stage rocket*: Histoire Comique de la Lune , Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657 • Lunarium**: A Voyage to the Moon , George Tucker, 1827 • Balloon: “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1835 • Giant Cannon: From the Earth to the Moon , Jules Verne, 1865 • Antigravity metal: First Men in the Moon , H.G. Wells, 1901

*This is the first mention of a multi-stage rocket in literature. **A metal that is only partially antigravitational: it is repelled by the Earth but attracted by the Moon.

Approaching the Apollo era

Films had been around in one form or another since the 1880s, but public screenings where people paid admission fees first started in 1895. In 1902, French filmmaker Georges Méliès made his landmark 21-minute film Le Voyage dans la Lune ( A Trip to the Moon ). In it, the spaceship is a bullet-like projectile a la Verne, but the plot is based on the Wells novel. Le Voyage dans la Lune is often regarded as the first science-fiction film.

Destinationmoonad

Heinlein’s tale is about a wealthy American businessman named D.D. Harriman who is obsessed with being the first man to set foot on the Moon. At a time when neither the technology nor public interest exists for a Moon landing, Harriman has the money, the PR savvy, and the con-man sensibilities to make it happen. And he does. The science is well-crafted, the characters are believable, and the ending? Ah, the ending. Harriman’s billionaire buddy backers won’t let him in the spaceship to become the first man to set foot on the Moon; he’s too valuable as the front-man selling the dream of spaceflight-for-all back on Earth.

Heinlein also played a role in another first Moon landing story. Except this one was a movie — and also a classic. Produced by George Pal and Irving Pichel, Destination Moon was released in 1950. Heinlein was approached to help write the script. He drew in part on the plot of his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo , but he also clearly incorporated plot lines from “The Man Who Sold the Moon.”

The movie itself is a well-plotted, reasonably well-acted story of corporations rather than governments providing the money and know-how to put a man on the Moon. There’s drama a-plenty, with dangerous situations solved by smart use of science and engineering. The movie accurately depicts weightlessness, the landing itself, and the lunar environment. The “cold equations” climax — where one of the crew must be left behind in order for the rest to make it home — is solved as only engineers could.

Many more imagined Moon landings appeared in both print and film before those first “small steps” in July 1969 turned imagination into reality. And they remain as reminders of how wide and deep we dream, and of how fierce our desire is to explore what waits out there beyond Earth’s thin atmosphere.

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Three medieval tales about adventures to the Moon from around the world

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Lecturer in Medieval English, University of Oxford

Disclosure statement

Ayoush Lazikani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Oxford provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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An engraving of a starry sky and the moon.

With the Japan mission to the Moon just beginning and with the space race to its south polar region , we are reminded of the wonder and excitement of travelling to the Moon.

Of course, since the 20th century, humans have been able to physically travel there, but imagining travel to the Moon has been part of our history from long before the 1900s. Looking back through the centuries reveals exciting stories of lunar adventure.

1. An English poem: The Man in the Moon

Engraving of the man in the moon

The English poem, The Man in the Moon , tells the story of a man who is living and suffering on the Moon. The poem is in a famous book known as the Harley manuscript , which was written in the 1300s.

There are many versions of this folktale, including in English, German and Dutch traditions. In this English version of the story, the man on the Moon (known as Hubert) is imagined as a medieval peasant guilty of stealing thorns to make a hedge. Medieval peasants would make hedges to act as fences, which were important for keeping animals from wandering.

It’s said in this poem that Hubert was born and raised on the Moon, though he also seems to be imprisoned there. In other traditions elsewhere in Europe, the peasant’s punishment is to be exiled to the Moon.

The person who speaks in the poem is on Earth, looking up at Hubert and trying to help free him from his imprisonment.

The cunning plan is this: the speaker and his wife will distract the “hayward” (legal official) by getting him drunk and then stealing the pledge (the penalty) the hayward has taken, in order to release Hubert. But unfortunately, Hubert can’t seem to hear the speaker of the poem and the speaker grows frustrated.

In this poem, there is a comical attempt to connect with Hubert – an attempt to bring the Moon and the Earth that bit closer.

2. An Italian epic poem: Orlando Furioso

An illustration of a boat travelling to the Moon

Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando) is an Italian epic written by poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533). It tells the story of Charlemagne’s knights and their adventures. Charlemagne (who died in 814) was a king and emperor who is known for uniting most of Europe under his rule. Unsurprisingly, there are many legends about him and his knights.

One of his knights is Astolfo, cousin to the knight Orlando. Orlando has “lost his mind” or “lost his wits”. His lost sanity can only be found on the Moon and so Astolfo has to travel there.

When Astolfo is on the Moon, he discovers that it is a kind of dump site and all that has been lost from Earth has found its way there – which is why Orlando’s lost sanity can be found on the Moon.

The Moon carries not only physical objects but also abstract ideas like fame, broken promises and the tears and sighs of lovers. The one thing Astolfo can’t find on the Moon is foolishness – because there is plenty of that here on Earth.

In this poem, the Moon becomes a reflection of Earth and its people, with all their limitations and frailties.

3. A Japanese story: The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

A Japanese painting of a woman in the sky.

What about Moon people travelling to the Earth? This very thing happens in a Japanese story from the late 800s or early 900s: Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter).

An old man, while cutting bamboo, finds a tiny, three-inch girl bathed in light. He takes her home and he and his wife nurture her tenderly, even placing her in a cradle.

She grows up remarkably quickly under the care of her adoptive parents, bringing them great joy. They bring a diviner to grant her a name, and she is called Nayotake no Kaguya-hime (Shining Princess of the Young Bamboo).

But in her adult years, Kaguya-hime keeps looking at the Moon with great sadness and her loved ones are worried about her. She eventually reveals what is wrong – she is not an earthling.

She actually comes from the Moon and now she must return there. A magnificent troop comes to take her away and Kaguya-hime is forced to leave the people on Earth she has grown to love.

Read more: The Boy and the Heron: Hayao Miyazaki's latest Studio Ghibli film is a skilled remix of his greatest hits

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is the earliest surviving example of the monogatari (tale, novel) and has been adapted into a Studio Ghibli animation, The Tale of Princess Kaguya .

The Moon has always been a place that inspires imaginative stories of travel, adventure, and discovery. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter also reminds us that these stories are not found only in Europe.

All these texts – the English poem, the Italian epic, the Japanese narrative – raise important questions about what it is to be human, and how valuable the Earth is itself.

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14 min read

History of Lunar Exploration

By paul d. spudis, lunar and planetary institute.

The Moon has held our imaginations for millennia, yet it is only in modern times that we have visited this body, first with robotic machines and then with astronauts. Exploration of the Moon has taught us much about the evolution of the solar system and ourselves. We’ve known for centuries about the effects on tides and biological cycles from a waxing and waning Moon. But it took space-age exploration to show us how the Moon is connected to human existence on a very fundamental level.

The Space Age arrives: Robots to the Moon

With the shocking launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957, the Moon changed from a distant silver disk in the sky to a real place, a probable destination for probes and people. The Soviets struck first, flying Luna 1 by the Moon in January 1959. They followed this success with a number of other robotic probes, culminating later the same year with Luna 3, which photographed the far side of the Moon, never visible from Earth. From these early, poor quality images, we discovered that the far side has surprisingly little of the dark, smooth mare plains that cover about a third of the near side. Other surprises would soon follow.

In response to the 1961 flight of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. The Apollo program greatly accelerated interest in exploring the Moon. To ensure that human crews could safely land and depart from the lunar surface, it was important to understand its environment, surface and processes. At the same time, the robotic precursors would collect valuable information, constituting the first scientific exploration of another planetary body.

Close up of the moon shows stark terrain and massive impact craters.

America’s first step was the Ranger series of hard landers. These probes were designed to photograph the lunar surface at increasing levels of detail before crashing into the surface. After several heartbreaking failures, Ranger 7 succeeded in sending back detailed television pictures of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds) in July 1964. From the Ranger probes, we discovered that craters, those strange holes that pepper the lunar surface, range down in size to the very limits of resolution. Micrometeorite bombardment has ground up the surface rocks, creating a fine powder (called regolith). Two more Ranger spacecraft flew to the Moon, culminating with the 1965 Live From the Moon television images from Ranger 9, careening into the spectacular lunar crater Alphonsus.

We got a much closer look at the Moon’s surface in early 1966. Again, the U.S.S.R. led the way by safely soft-landing the robotic Luna 9 spacecraft on the mare plain, Oceanus Procellarum. It found the surface to be powdery dirt strewn with a few rocks, but strong enough to support the weight of a landed spacecraft. In May 1966, the United States followed with the landing of the complex robotic spacecraft, Surveyor 1. It sent television pictures back to Earth, showing the surface and its physical properties in detail. Later Surveyor missions (five in all), collected physical data on soil properties, including its chemical composition. Analysis of the lunar surface showed that the dark maria had a composition similar to terrestrial basalt, a dark iron-rich lava, while the highlands near the very fresh rayed crater Tycho were lighter in color and strangely enriched in aluminum. This led to an astonishing revelation about the Moon’s early history after the first physical samples were later returned to Earth by the Apollo 11 crew.

The final robotic missions mapped the entire Moon from orbit for the first time and obtained extremely high resolution pictures of potential landing sites, certifying their safety for the Apollo missions to follow. This U.S. Lunar Orbiter series conducted five mapping missions, whereby boulders as small as a couple of meters could be seen. They also obtained amazing views of scientifically interesting targets, such as the first “pilot’s eye” view of the large, brightly rayed crater Copernicus, dubbed the “picture of the century” by news reporters. More “pictures of the century” were soon to be obtained by people walking on the Moon.

From these robotic missions, we learned that the Moon was cratered and pitted at all scales. The surface was powdery dust but strong enough to support the weight of people and machines. The Moon had no global magnetic field or atmosphere and was made up of common rock types, similar to those found on Earth. Now the stage was set for the next giant leap in understanding lunar and planetary history.

Apollo: The Humans Follow

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Apollo was the finest hour of America’s space program. In just eight years, we had gone from zero human spaceflight capability to landing men on the surface of the Moon. From these missions, scientists developed a new view of the origin and evolution of the planets and of life on Earth.

The 1968 Christmastime flight of Apollo 8 was a milestone – humans left low Earth orbit and reached the Moon, circling it for almost a day. For the first time, people gazed on the Moon from orbit. They found it desolate and gray, but saw nothing to prevent journeying the final 62 miles to the surface. In May of 1969, Apollo 10 orbited the Moon, testing the lunar lander. It was a dress rehearsal for the manned landing to come. Each of the Apollo missions – and the astronauts who remained in the orbiting Command Module during the subsequent landed missions – took hundreds of high-resolution photographs of the Moon’s surface. Their visual observations added to the burgeoning knowledge of lunar geology.

In a harrowing descent marked by program alarms from an overloaded computer and freezing fuel lines, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11 safely landed in Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) on July 20, 1969. They walked on the Moon for over 2 hours, collecting rocks and soil and laying out experiment packages. From the Apollo 11 samples, we learned that the dark maria are ancient volcanic lavas, having crystallized over 3.6 billion years ago. Lunar samples are similar in chemical composition to Earth rocks but extremely dry, with no evidence for any significant water on the Moon, past or present. Small bits of white rock were found in the soil, blasted to the site from distant highlands. Combined with the earlier results of the Surveyor 7 chemical analysis at the crater Tycho, scientists reasoned that the ancient Moon had been nearly completely molten, covered in a layer of liquid rock. This idea of an early “magma ocean” has since been applied to all the rocky planets. Micrometeorite bombardment ground up the bedrock and gases from the sun were implanted on the surfaces of the lunar dust grains. While preserved on the Moon, most of this ancient, shared history has been lost on our geologically active Earth.

In November 1969, Apollo 12 touched down in Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms), near the previously landed Surveyor 3 spacecraft. This mission demonstrated our ability to precisely land on the Moon, a skill critical for navigating to future sites in the highlands and rugged areas. Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean explored the site in two moonwalks. They collected over 75 pounds of samples and deployed a nuclear-powered experiment package. Lavas from this landing site are slightly younger than those of Apollo 11, but still over 3.1 billion years old. The highland component here is different from that of the first landing; it has an unusual enrichment in radioactive and rare-earth elements, suggesting that the Moon’s crust is laterally variable and complex. As a bonus, the crew also returned a light colored soil, possibly part of a “ray” cast-off and flung outward during the formation of the distant crater Copernicus – 186 miles north of the landing site. Dating of glass from this soil suggests that Copernicus is “only” 900 million years old, ancient by Earth standards but one of the youngest major features on the Moon.

The explosion of an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 prevented it from landing on the Moon. The three-man crew returned safely to Earth — a memorable saga closely followed around the world. Apollo 14 was sent to a highlands site east of Apollo 12, near the ancient crater Fra Mauro. This site was chosen to collect rocks blasted out from deep within the Moon by the formation of the giant Imbrium impact basin, a crater over 620 miles in diameter and situated 3,723 miles north of the landing site. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell conducted two moonwalks on the lunar surface. Towing a pull-cart filled with tools, they returned over 95 pounds of rock and soil. Samples from the Fra Mauro highlands are breccias (complex mixtures of ancient rocks), broken and crushed by the giant impact that created the Imbrium basin. From these samples, scientists learned the Imbrium impact occurred more than 3.8 billion years ago, before the dark mare lavas flooded the Moon’s surface but well after the formation of the Moon’s crust over 4.4 billion years ago. After this third landing, a new picture of lunar evolution was emerging. The Moon was not a simple lump of cold meteorite nor was it an active volcanic inferno, but a planetary body with its own complex, subtle history.

In July 1971, with Apollo 15, NASA began the first of three what were termed "J" missions – long duration stays on the Moon with a greater focus on science than had been possible previously. Apollo 15, whose lunar module Falcon spent three days on the lunar surface, was the first mission to use a lunar rover — a small electric cart that allowed the crew to travel many kilometers away from their landing craft. On three lunar rover excursions Dave Scott and Jim Irwin explored the beautiful Hadley-Apennine landing site — a valley at the base of the main rim of the huge Imbrium basin that included both mare and highland rocks. The crew returned the “Genesis Rock,” composed almost entirely of a single mineral (plagioclase feldspar), representing the most ancient crustal rocks on the Moon. They also found small fragments of an emerald green glass, formed when magma from the deep mantle explosively erupted through the crust in a spray of lava. They sampled the mare bedrock at the edge of Hadley Rille, a giant canyon and ancient lava channel, formed over 3.3 billion years ago. The Apollo 15 mission obtained over 80 kilograms of samples and its command module carried chemical sensors and cameras that mapped almost 20 percent of the Moon’s surface from orbit.

Apollo 16 was sent to the ancient crater Descartes, deep in the lunar highlands in April 1972. Astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke spent three days exploring the site. They traveled over 18 miles and collected more than 206 pounds of samples. They deployed and operated the first astronomical telescope on the Moon. The highlands rocks, almost all breccias, attest to a long and complicated history of repeated impacts from space. Ancient crustal rocks, similar to the Genesis Rock of Apollo 15, were also found. One puzzling observation by the crew was the measurement of a very strong magnetic field on the surface. Even though the Moon has no global magnetic field, some lunar samples have remnant magnetism, suggesting that they cooled in the presence of strong fields. Although we still do not understand lunar magnetism, with the flight of Lunar Prospector 26 years later, the Apollo 16 result would become a little clearer.

The last human mission to the Moon to date, Apollo 17, was sent to the edge of Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) -- another combination mare/highland site -- in December 1972. Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt (the first professional geologist sent to the Moon) spent three days thoroughly exploring the Taurus-Littrow valley. They returned over 242 pounds of samples and deployed a set of new surface experiments. They made startling and significant discoveries. The crew found 3.6-billion-year old orange volcanic ash. From the mountains, they returned crustal rocks and complex breccias created during the impact that formed the Serenitatis basin almost 3.9 billion years ago. Lavas at this site are over 3.6 billion years old, documenting at least a 700-million-year span of lava flooding on the Moon.

The Apollo missions revolutionized planetary science. The early solar system was one of colliding planets, melted surfaces and exploding volcanoes — a complex and violent geologic mixture. The concept of an “early bombardment” 3.9 billion years ago is now widely accepted for all the planets, but the actual evidence comes from study of the lunar samples. The constant rain of micrometeorites grinds away all airless planetary surfaces, albeit this sandblaster is extremely slow (the Moon erodes at a rate of roughly 1 millimeter per million years.) While Apollo did a magnificent job of outlining lunar history, more surprises were waiting to be unveiled.

The Robots Return: Clementine and Lunar Prospector

In the 1990s, two small robotic missions were sent to the Moon. For 71 days in 1994, the joint NASA-Strategic Defense Initiative Organization Clementine mission orbited the Moon, testing sensors developed for space-based missile defense, as well as mapping the color and shape of the Moon. From Clementine, we documented the enormous south pole-Aitken impact basin, a hole in the Moon 1, 616 miles across and over 8 miles deep. This basin is so large, it may have excavated the entire crust down to the mantle. The color data from Clementine, combined with Apollo sample information, allows us to map regional compositions, creating the first true “rock map” of the Moon. Finally, Clementine gave us a tantalizing hint that permanently dark areas near the south pole of the Moon may contain frozen water deposited over millions of years by impacting comets.

Photo of the Moon, center-focus on the south pole

Soon after Clementine, the Lunar Prospector spacecraft mapped the Moon’s surface from orbit during its mission in 1998 and 1999. These data, combined with those from Clementine, gave scientists global compositional maps showing the complicated crust of the Moon. Lunar Prospector also mapped the surface magnetic fields for the first time. The data showed that the Apollo 16 Descartes highlands is one of the strongest magnetic areas on the Moon, explaining the surface measurements made by John Young in 1972. The mission also found enhanced quantities of hydrogen at both poles, adding to the lively controversy over the welcome prospect for lunar ice.

The Moon throws stones at us: Lunar meteorites

In 1982, we made a startling discovery. A meteorite found in Antarctica, ALHA 81005, is from the Moon! The rock is a complex regolith breccia, similar to those returned by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. We have since found over 50 meteorites that, as determined from their unique chemical composition, come from the Moon. These rocks were blasted off the lunar surface by impacts, then captured and swept up by Earth as it moves through space. The lunar meteorites come from random places all over the Moon and they provide data complementary to the Apollo samples and the global maps of composition obtained by Clementine and Lunar Prospector.

The Future and Significance of Lunar Exploration

Now we are preparing for humanity’s return to the Moon. Over the next couple of years, at least four international robotic missions will orbit the Moon, making global maps of unsurpassed quality. We will soft land on the Moon, particularly the mysterious polar regions, to map the surface, examine the volatile deposits and characterize the unusual environment there. Ultimately, people will return to the Moon. The goals of lunar return this time are not to prove that we can do it (as Apollo did) but to learn how to use the Moon to support a new and growing spacefaring capability. On the Moon, we will learn the skills and develop the technologies needed to live and work on another world. We will use this knowledge and technology to open the solar system for human exploration.

The story of the Moon’s history and processes is interesting in its own right, but it has also subtly shifted perspectives on our own origins. One of the most significant discoveries of the 1980s was the giant impact 65 million years ago in Mexico that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, allowing the subsequent rise of mammals. This discovery (made possible by recognizing and interpreting the telltale chemical and physical signs of hypervelocity impact) came directly from the study of impact rocks and landforms stimulated by Apollo. Scientists now think that impacts are responsible for many, if not most, extinction events in the history of life on Earth. The Moon retains this record and we will read it in detail upon our return.

By going to the Moon, we continue to obtain new insights into how the universe works and our own origins. Lunar exploration revolutionized understanding of the collision of solid bodies. This process, previously thought to be bizarre and unusual, is now viewed as fundamental to planetary origin and evolution – an unexpected connection. By returning to the Moon, we anticipate learning even more about our past, and equally importantly, obtaining a glimpse into our future.

A Reading List of Stories About the Moon

For the 45th anniversary of the lunar landing, we dipped into the archives.

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What is it about the moon that inspires people so? It's gorgeous and glowing—oh, and by the way, humans totally walked on that thing . Nothing like gazing at the moon to make a person marvel at the universe, the wonderfully astounding bigness and smallness of humanity and existence and life and all of it.

Which is at least part of why the moon comes up in our writing so much.

And so, to commemorate the moment—45 years ago this weekend!—that some brave men in a rocket finally landed on the lunar surface, we're revisiting some of our favorite moon stories.

If there's something we've forgotten, or other moon reads you think should be on this list, please share links in the comments section.

Moonquakes and Marsquakes Earth isn’t the only place that shakes from time to time.

Why Land on the Moon? The moon is the Rosetta stone of the solar system.

What Were the Last Words Spoken on the Moon? Probably not, alas, "let's get this mother out of here"...

Doomsday Speeches: If D-Day and the Moon Landing Had Failed If these landmark events had ended in tragedy, here's what General Eisenhower and President Nixon planned to say.

How the Moon Became a Real Place Once humans stepped on, smelled, and tasted the lunar surface—our relationship with it changed forever.

What Space Smells Like Meat, metal, raspberries, rum

How the Moon Was Born New evidence solves an old mystery about the origins of Earth's largest satellite.

Communion on the Moon: The Religious Experience in Space Our secular endeavor of space exploration is flush with religious observance. Why is that?

No, the Moon Did Not Sink the Titanic That the ship was downed by the alignment of celestial bodies is an alluring theory, but it's not, alas, a plausible one.

Here's a Climate-Change Fix: a Giant Solar-Power Plant on the Moon Imagined by Japan, staffed by robots

The Trash We've Left on the Moon The lunar surface is strewn with hundreds of manmade items, from spacecraft to bags of urine to monumental plaques.

Not Sleeping Well? Blame the Moon Lunar phases seem to affect the length and quality of our sleep.

How Going to Space Can Mess With the Astronaut Brain A new study finds that deep-space travel could warp reaction time.

1 Small Step for a Cam: How Astronauts Shot Video of the Moon Landing On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 beamed video from the moon back to Earth, live. Here's how they did it.

We Just Sent the Mona Lisa to the Moon... With Lasers The first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances

How Do We Welcome Astronauts Back to Earth? By Making Them Go Through Customs Triumphant returns are also a triumph for bureaucracy.

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon: 'More Desolate Than Any Place on Earth' The second man to set foot on the lunar surface answers the Internet's questions.

Gil Scott-Heron's Poem, 'Whitey on the Moon' It changed the way I thought about the space race forever.

Who Was First in the Race to the Moon? The tortoise

NASA Records an Explosion on the Moon So Bright You Could Have Seen It With Your Bare Eyes And now you can, in a video.

How Did the Moon Form? We May Need a New Theory There may be much more water on the moon than we thought. And that could change everything.

A Rare Glimpse of the Moon Orbiting the Earth From Afar In just a few flickering pixels, our entire planet and its only moon.

We're Now Putting Ads on the Moon A beverage company is soon to put some sports drink on the lunar surface.

What the Night Sky Would Look Like If the Other Planets Were as Close as the Moon It's not always easy to imagine just how big the other planets are. Here, a space artist's thought experiment turns into a lesson in Earth's relative size.

The Missing Man: There Are No Good Pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon The iconic images from the Apollo 11 lunar landing are all of Buzz Aldrin or his footprint.

What If a Large Asteroid Were to Hit the Moon? It would take another nearly moon-sized object to actually move the moon.

The Apollo 11 Journey in Photographs Words can't describe the trip the astronauts—and the nation—took that day.

A Rare Audio Visit to the Apollo 11 Triumph A very, very brief history of the space race in sounds, photographs, and animated GIFs.

Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program For most of our lunar adventure, a majority of Americans did not support going to the moon. On the 50th anniversary of JFK's "We choose to go the moon" speech, we examine why.

Tower of Light: When Electricity Was New, People Used It to Mimic the Moon Before streetlights became the standard way to light cities, town leaders looked to "moonlight towers" to provide mass illumination.

And the Flag Was Still There New images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera confirm that five of the six American flags on the moon survive.

Kennedy, Before Choosing the Moon: 'I'm Not That Interested in Space' The president sought space not because it was easy, but because it was expedient.

Was the Apollo Project an 'Aberration' for America? The reality was always less glamorous than advertised.

Astro Mad Men: NASA's 1960s Campaign to Win America's Heart As soon as the agency was established, it set to work buying space in the public imagination.

45 Years Ago We Landed Men on the Moon 45 images of that historic mission, a "giant leap for mankind."

When We Blew Up Arizona to Simulate the Moon In the late 1960s, NASA created an offworld analogue with dynamite and fertilizer bombs outside Flagstaff, Arizona, so that astronauts could train for the Apollo missions.

Why the Moon Fascinates Us Why haven't we gone back? Is there nothing left to learn? Filmmaker Asher Isbrucker asks these questions and many more.

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Lunar Tales: The First (Imaginative) Moon Landings

Since at least 125 a.d., humans have been telling stories about visiting the moon..

A Trip to the Moon 1902 - Flickr

It’s been 50 years since humans first landed on the Moon. But for how long have we rehearsed those first steps in our imaginations? This we do know: We’ve been telling each other tales about our Moon-landing dreams for nearly 2,000 years.

The earliest known written story about people traveling to the Moon was by Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian-Greek writer born around 125 AD. His travels throughout the Mediterranean world were the basis for the fictional tales in his  True Stories , an often bawdy satire of Homer’s revered epic the  Odyssey .

One such story tells of the journey Lucian and 50 companions take on a boat carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. When they arrive on the lunar surface, they’re greeted by a race of three-headed vultures and soon find themselves in the middle of a war with another species. Eventually they make their way back to Earth and experience more fantastic adventures. Lucian’s lunar tale is the earliest known piece of fiction that depicts space travel, a Moon landing, aliens,  and  interplanetary war.

Some 15 centuries later, three people changed our view of our place in the universe forever. Nicolas Copernicus published his heliocentric theory of the universe, which replaced the Earth with the Sun at the center of the solar system; Galileo Galilei spotted sunspots, the phases of Venus, and moons circling Jupiter; and Johannes Kepler showed us that the planets circle the Sun in ellipses. 

But Kepler also wrote a novel about landing on the Moon. Entitled  Somnium  ( A Dream ), he began writing it when he was still a teenager. Although it took him about two decades to complete, he eventually finished it in 1608. However, it wasn’t published until 1634 — four years after his death.

The story is framed as Kepler’s dream. The main character, the young son of an Icelandic woman who might be a witch, is fascinated by astronomy and serves as a stand-in for Kepler himself. Much of the book is a riveting (and in some ways accurate) account of the boy’s journey through space to the Moon, including whom he encounters and what he observes. 

In the tale, there exists an omnipresent aether that fills the void between Earth and the Moon. It’s very cold, so humans must rely on summoned demons to keep them warm. The human travelers must also plug their noses with damp sponges to help them breathe. The trip is so stressful that they must be put in suspended animation. Kepler’s descriptions of how the Earth would look from the Moon are surprisingly accurate, even by today’s standards. Overall, the science in  Somnium  is remarkable for its time.

Most subsequent stories about lunar journeys were satires, like George Tucker’s 1827 work:  A Voyage to the Moon . But writers also began treating tales of lunar voyages a bit more seriously. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 story, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” was a mix of satire and serious speculative fiction. The imaginative breakthrough came three decades later from the pen of French writer Jules Verne:  From the Earth to the Moon  (1865), followed by  Around the Moon  (1870). 

In Verne’s work, members of the post-Civil War Baltimore Gun Club use an arguably scientific method — a giant cannon — to shoot their travelers around the Moon. But they don’t land. Instead, they experience a series of misadventures while in orbit around the Moon before eventually making their way back to Earth. 

On the other hand, the two protagonists of H.G. Wells’ 1901 novel  The First Men in the Moon  use a “hand-waving science” method of travel. But they actually land on the Moon, explore it, and return. In the story, an eccentric physicist named Cavor plans to land on the Moon in a ship of his own design powered by a metal he invented with antigravity properties called “cavorite.” After enlisting the reluctant help of an English businessman named Bedford, they build a steel sphere with glass windows and sliding cavorite shutters. Sliding these open and closed allows them to “steer” the ship to the Moon. 

Off they go, weightlessness on the way. They land safely on the Moon (which has a breathable atmosphere) and explore its surface. They then drunkenly enter the Moon’s underground caverns, where they are promptly captured by insectoid extraterrestrials called Selenites. After more harrowing experiences, the two men escape and make their way back to the lunar surface. They split up, looking for their ship, but Cavor is injured. Bedford reluctantly leaves the Moon, alone. Later, home and safe, Bedford learns that scientists are receiving radio transmissions from Cavor, who is still alive and still trapped in the Moon.

For nearly two millennia, storytellers have devised some ingenious methods to get their characters to the Moon. Here are just a few highlights:

Giant waterspout:  True History , Lucian of Samosata, ca. 2nd century AD

A “shadow bridge”:  Somnium , Johannes Kepler, 1634

Multi-stage rocket*:  Histoire Comique de la Lune , Cyrano de Bergerac, 1657

Lunarium**:  A Voyage to the Moon , George Tucker, 1827

Balloon: “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall,” Edgar Allan Poe, 1835

Giant Cannon:  From the Earth to the Moon , Jules Verne, 1865

Antigravity metal:  First Men in the Moon , H.G. Wells, 1901

*This is the first mention of a multi-stage rocket in literature. **A metal that is only partially antigravitational: it is repelled by the Earth but attracted by the Moon.

Approaching the Apollo Era

Films had been around in one form or another since the 1880s, but public screenings where people paid admission fees first started in 1895. In 1902, French filmmaker Georges Méliès made his landmark 21-minute film  Le Voyage dans la Lune  ( A Trip to the Moon ). In it, the spaceship is a bullet-like projectile a la Verne, but the plot is based on the Wells novel.  Le Voyage dans la Lune  is often regarded as the first science-fiction film.

By the 1920s, the art of filmmaking had advanced far beyond Méliès. In 1929, Austrian director Fritz Lang released his follow-up to his futuristic flick  Metropolis  (1927). Entitled  Woman in the Moon , it’s about six people (five men and a women) who travel to the Moon in search of gold. The plotline and acting resemble a TV soap opera, and the Moon has normal gravity and a breathable atmosphere on its far side. But the special effects are remarkable. Especially impressive are the rocket launch and the scenes as the ship slips around behind the Moon.

From the 1930’s through the end of World War II, sci-fi stories with lunar themes were mostly about exploration, aliens, and the Moon’s desolate environment, not about first landings. That began to change at the end of the war. One story that stands out is the 1950 Robert A. Heinlein novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” 

Heinlein’s tale is about a wealthy American businessman named D.D. Harriman who is obsessed with being the first man to set foot on the Moon. At a time when neither the technology nor public interest exists for a Moon landing, Harriman has the money, the PR savvy, and the con-man sensibilities to make it happen. And he does. The science is well-crafted, the characters are believable, and the ending? Ah, the ending. Harriman’s billionaire buddy backers won’t let him in the spaceship to become the first man to set foot on the Moon; he’s too valuable as the front-man selling the dream of spaceflight-for-all back on Earth. 

Heinlein also played a role in another first Moon landing story. Except this one was a movie — and also a classic. Produced by George Pal and Irving Pichel,  Destination Moon  was released in 1950. Heinlein was approached to help write the script. He drew in part on the plot of his juvenile novel  Rocket Ship Galileo , but he also clearly incorporated plot lines from “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” 

The movie itself is a well-plotted, reasonably well-acted story of corporations rather than governments providing the money and know-how to put a man on the Moon. There’s drama a-plenty, with dangerous situations solved by smart use of science and engineering. The movie accurately depicts weightlessness, the landing itself, and the lunar environment. The “cold equations” climax — where one of the crew must be left behind in order for the rest to make it home — is solved as only engineers could. 

Many more imagined Moon landings appeared in both print and film before those first “small steps” in July 1969 turned imagination into reality. And they remain as reminders of how wide and deep we dream, and of how fierce our desire is to explore what waits out there beyond Earth’s thin atmosphere.

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A brief history of moon exploration

In the 1950s, the cold war sparked a race to visit earth's moon with flybys, robots, and crewed missions. here's what we discovered—and what's next..

Apollo 17 mission Commander Eugene Cernan checks out the lunar roving vehicle (LRV) at the Taurus-Littrow ...

For as long as humans have gazed skyward, the moon has been a focus of fascination. We could always see our cosmic partner’s mottled, cratered face by eye. Later, telescopes sharpened our views of its bumps, ridges, and relict lava seas. Finally, in the mid-20th century, humans visited Earth’s moon and saw its surface up close.

Since then, a volley of spacecraft have studied our nearest celestial neighbour, swooping low over its dusty plains and surveying its curious far side. Now, after six decades of exploration, we are once again aiming to send humans to the lunar surface.

Early forays into space

The earliest forays into lunar exploration were a product of the ongoing Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union sent uncrewed spacecraft to orbit and land on the moon.

The Soviets scored an early victory in January 1959, when Luna 1 , a small Soviet sphere bristling with antennas, became the first spacecraft to escape Earth’s gravity and ultimately fly within about 4,000 miles of the moon’s surface. (Read more about early spaceflight.)

Later in 1959, Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to make contact with the moon's surface when it crashed in the Mare Imbrium basin near the Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus craters. That same year, a third Luna mission captured the first, blurry images of the far side of the moon—where the rugged highland terrain is markedly different from the smoother basins on the side closest to Earth.

Then, the U.S. got in the game with nine NASA Ranger spacecraft that launched between 1961 and 1965, and gave scientists the first close-up views of the moon’s surface. The Ranger missions were daring one-offs, with spacecraft engineered to streak toward the moon and capture as many images as possible before crashing onto its surface. By 1965, images from all the Ranger missions, particularly Ranger 9 , had revealed greater detail about the moon’s rough terrain and the potential challenges of finding a smooth landing site for humans.

In 1966, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 became the first vehicle to land safely on the lunar surface. Stocked with scientific and communications equipment, the small spacecraft photographed a ground-level lunar panorama. Later that year, Luna 10 launched, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit the moon.

NASA also landed a spacecraft on the moon’s surface that year with the first of its Surveyor space probes , which carried cameras to explore the moon's surface and soil samplers to analyse lunar rock and dirt. Over the two years that followed, NASA launched five Lunar Orbiter missions that were designed to circle the moon and chart its surface in preparation for the ultimate goal: landing astronauts on the surface. These orbiters photographed about 99 percent of the moon's surface, revealing potential landing sites and paving the way for a giant leap forward in space exploration. (See a map of all lunar landings.)

Humans on the moon

At the time, NASA was racing to fulfill a presidential promise: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a person on the moon before the decade was complete. The Apollo program , by far the most expensive spaceflight endeavour in history , kicked off that year, and by the time it ended in 1972, nine missions and 24 astronauts had orbited or landed on the moon.

Perhaps the most famous of those, Apollo 11 , marked the first time humans had stepped on another world.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in the lunar lander Eagle, while astronaut Michael Collins orbited the moon in the command module Columbia. Armstrong, who pressed the first bootprints into the moon’s surface, famously said , “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The pair stayed on the moon’s surface for 21 hours and 36 minutes before rendezvousing with Collins and heading back to Earth. 

Each mission after Apollo 11 set new milestones in space travel and lunar exploration. Four months after the first humans reached the moon, Apollo 12 touched down, achieving a much more precise landing on the moon.

Apollo 13 narrowly avoided a near-disaster when on-board oxygen tanks exploded in April 1970, forcing the crew to abort a planned moon landing. All three survived.

During the third lunar landing, in January 1971, Apollo 14 , commander Alan Shepard set a new record for the farthest distance travelled on the moon: 9,000 feet. He even lobbed a few golf balls into a nearby crater with a makeshift 6-iron .

Apollo 15 , launched in July 1971, was the first of three missions capable of a longer stay on the moon. In the course of three days spent on the lunar surface, achievements included collecting hundreds of pounds of lunar samples and traveling more than 17 miles in the first piloted moon buggy. (The Soviet Union had sent a remotely controlled rover to the moon , Lunokhod 1, in 1970.)

Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 in 1972 were the two most recent crewed missions to the moon, and Russia’s Luna-24 crewless spacecraft in 1976 was the last to land until the following century. Samples collected during these lunar explorations produced huge amounts of knowledge about the geology and formation of the Earth’s moon . (See a timeline of the space race and its modern-day version in private spaceflight.)

After the dramatic accomplishments of the 1960s and 1970s, the major space agencies turned their attention elsewhere for several decades. So far, only 12 humans—all Americans and all men—have set foot on the moon.

Moon curiosity builds again

It wasn’t until 1994 that the moon came back into focus for the United States, with a joint mission between NASA and the Strategic Defence Initiative Organisation. The Clementine spacecraft mapped the moon's surface in wavelengths other than visible light, from ultraviolet to infrared . Hiding in the more than 1.8 million digital photos it captured were hints of ice in some of the moon’s craters.

Royal Museums Greenwich, permission of Lord Egremont

In 1999, the Lunar Prospector orbited the moon, confirming Clementine’s discovery of ice at the lunar poles, a resource that could be crucial for any long-term lunar settlement. The mission's end was spectacular: Prospector slammed into the moon, intending to create a plume that could be studied for evidence of water ice but none was observed. (Ten years later, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft repeated this experiment and found evidence for water in a shadowed region near the moon’s south pole .)

Since 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken high-resolution maps of the lunar surface. Between 2011 and 2012, it was joined in orbit by NASA’s twin GRAIL probes —named Ebb and Flow—which mapped the moon’s gravitational field before intentionally crashing into a region near the lunar north pole.

The recent—and future—status of moon exploration

NASA isn’t the only space agency with a surging interest in the moon. Within the last two decades, lunar exploration has gone truly international—and even commercial.

In 2007, Japan launched its first lunar orbiter, SELENE . China launched its first lunar spacecraft the same year, and India followed suit in 2008. By 2013, China became the third country to successfully land on the lunar surface, when its Chang’e-3 spacecraft deployed the Yutu rover.

More milestones—both for better and worse—were achieved in 2019. In January, another Chinese lander, Yutu-2, made history by becoming the first rover to touch down on the lunar farside . Meanwhile, India’s second lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-2 , unsuccessfully deployed a small lander, Vikram , on the lunar surface that year. (India’s space agency hopes to try again in 2021 .) And in April 2019 Israel aimed for the moon with the launch of its Beresheet spacecraft . Unfortunately, even though the spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, it crashed during its attempt to land.

Unlike other spacecraft that came before it, Beresheet was built largely with private funding , heralding a new era of lunar exploration in which private companies are hoping to take the reins from governments.

NASA, for one, is partnering with commercial spaceflight companies to develop both robotic and crewed landers for lunar exploration; among those companies are SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin have announced the goal of establishing a lunar base near the south pole where people could work and live. SpaceX is developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to the moon and Mars , and is also developing a plan to bring tourists to lunar orbit. ( The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars .)

And not to be overshadowed by the commercial sector, NASA is planning its own ambitious return to the moon. The agency’s Artemis program, a sister to the venerable Apollo project, aims to put the first woman—and the next man— on the moon by 2024 . The backbone of Artemis is NASA’s Orion space capsule , currently in development, although the agency is also partnering with private companies to achieve its goal.

If Artemis goes well, then the near future might also see NASA and partners developing a space station in lunar orbit that could serve as a gateway to destinations on the moon’s surface—and beyond.

Sources: Blue Origin NASA Ames Research Center: Lunar Prospector NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Lunar Orbiter NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Surveyor NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Moon Missions NASA Mission Pages: The Apollo Missions NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive: Spacecraft Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: Apollo Program SpaceX U.S. Naval Research Laboratory: Clementine
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Neil Armstrong

By: History.com Editors

Published: September 26, 2023

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, Commander of NASA's Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, photographed at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, Texas, July 1969.

On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, arguably the greatest technological achievement in human history. The moon landing made Armstrong famous, but the Navy pilot from Ohio was never comfortable with the spotlight. Right up until his death in 2012, Armstrong deflected praise for his role in the historic Apollo 11 mission , echoing his famous words as he first stepped onto the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Early Life and Korean War

Neil Armstrong always wanted to fly. He was born on August 5, 1930 near Wapakoneta, Ohio, less than 60 miles from the Wright brothers’ workshop in Dayton. In 1936, when he was six years old, young Neil rode in his first airplane, a “Tin Goose” Ford tri-motor passenger plane. He was hooked. At 16, Armstrong earned his student pilot’s license, even before he had a driver’s license.

In 1947, Armstrong attended Purdue University on a Naval scholarship, studying aeronautical engineering. As part of his scholarship, the Navy trained Armstrong as a fighter pilot in Florida. His college studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the Korean War , where Armstrong flew 78 combat missions. His aircraft, the F-9F Panther jet, was one of the first jet fighters to launch from a carrier. 

NASA Test Pilot

After finishing college, Armstrong went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. The mild-mannered kid from Ohio made his name as one of the most daring and skilled test pilots at NASA’s Flight Research Center (now the Armstrong Flight Research Center) at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

During seven years as a test pilot, Armstrong flew 200 different aircraft that pushed the limits of speed and altitude, including the legendary X-15. High over the California desert, Armstrong reached speeds of more than 4,000 mph and took the needle-nosed X-15 to the edge of space. Armstrong’s steady hand as a test pilot was instrumental to the success of NASA’s first Mercury astronauts . Soon he’d become one of them.

The Gemini Program

1962 was a year of joy and heartache for the Armstrong family. Neil was chosen for NASA’s astronaut training program in Houston, but he and his wife Janet also lost their second child, a two-year-old daughter named Karen, to an inoperable brain tumor.

Armstrong buried himself in his work preparing for the Gemini program, NASA’s next step toward reaching the moon. In 1966, Armstrong was chosen as command pilot for the Gemini 8 mission, the first time that NASA astronauts would attempt to connect two spacecraft in orbit, a difficult and dangerous maneuver known as “rendezvous and docking.”

In March, 1966, Armstrong and his copilot David Scott rocketed into orbit and successfully docked with the target spacecraft Agena, but things quickly went awry. A thruster on the Gemini 8 capsule malfunctioned and the two interlocked spacecraft began to veer off course. To avoid burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, Armstrong detached from the Agena, but the release of the Agena’s weight sent the Gemini capsule into an uncontrolled spin.

The G-forces created by the end-over-end spin were crushing and both astronauts were on the verge of losing consciousness when Armstrong activated a set of secondary thrusters and wrestled the Gemini capsule back under control. There’s no doubt that Armstrong’s test pilot nerves saved both astronauts’ lives.

The Moon Landing

Armstrong was selected for the Apollo program, the final push to the moon, but he almost never made it back to space. On May 6, 1968, Armstrong was in Houston conducting his 22nd test flight of the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, an ungainly practice aircraft. Without warning, the LLRV veered out of control. Armstrong ejected and parachuted to safety, seconds before the LLRV crashed in a fiery explosion.

Undaunted, Armstrong continued his training and was chosen by NASA as the spacecraft commander for Apollo 11, the mission to land the first men on the moon. His crewmates were Michael Collins , pilot of the command module that orbited the moon, and Buzz Aldrin , the lunar module pilot. Aldrin lobbied hard to be the first to step on the lunar surface, but the NASA brass chose Armstrong for his calm confidence and total lack of ego.

Those trademark nerves were on display on July 20, 1969 as Armstrong piloted the Lunar Module toward the surface of the moon. With fuel running dangerously low, Armstrong switched to manual control to steer the fragile spacecraft away from a field of “Volkswagen”-sized boulders and land the astronauts safely in the silty lunar soil.

As millions watched the live broadcast on their televisions, the shy pilot from Ohio descended the ladder of the Lunar Module and uttered his now-famous words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Because of the static-filled connection, the “a” was inaudible, but Armstrong insisted that he said it.

Life After the Moon Landing

Overnight, Armstrong became the most famous man alive. Four million spectators lined the streets of New York City to welcome home Armstrong and his fellow Apollo 11 astronauts in a ticker-tape parade. But Armstrong wasn’t in it for the fame and accolades. He quietly went back to a desk job at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., then earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California in 1970.

Armstrong retired from NASA in 1971 and took a job as an engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati in his home state of Ohio. In 1986, he joined the Rogers Commission investigating the tragic Challenger shuttle explosion . Later, Armstrong served on a number of corporate boards in the aerospace industry and testified before Congress about the importance of maintaining a manned space program.  

In 2005, Armstrong consented to a rare television interview on 60 Minutes , in which he was asked directly if he was uncomfortable with the fame of being the first man on the moon. “No, I just don’t deserve it,” replied Armstrong, smiling. “Circumstance put me into that particular role. That wasn’t planned by anyone.”

In 2012, Armstrong went in for heart bypass surgery and the 82-year-old astronaut died of complications.

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HISTORY Vault: The Apollo 11 Moon Landing

This documentary unearths lost tapes of the Apollo 11 astronauts, and explores the dangers and challenges of the mission to the moon.

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Journeys to the Moon in Ancient Greece

William Shatner has recently attracted widespread criticism for undertaking a 10-minute space flight with Jeff Bezos’ space travel company, Blue Origin. Two themes emerge clearly from interviews with Shatner about the experience: first, that travel away from the earth provides a new perspective on it; second, more subtly, that space is no longer a rarely-crossed frontier for scientific investigation, but a place, to which leisure travel is not only possible but becoming commercially realistic (if only for the super-rich).

It is not intuitive, in a world before space travel, that we would think of space, or even of the planets, as places in their own right. Two of the best-known early works which involve space travel are Athanasius Kircher’s Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emmanuel Swedenborg’s The Earths in Our Solar System (1758). Although these works involve all the planets, by the late nineteenth century, Mars and Martians had begun to occupy a disproportionately prominent place in fiction; the huge popularity of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) has ensured that Mars has remained the primary focus of pop-cultural imagination about space travel .

Moon in seventeenth century book

Why did Mars become the most interesting planet to travel to? One possible reason is that with a good telescope, Mars can be seen quite clearly. In contrast, Venus is covered in clouds. Such observations became possible in the late nineteenth century. Asaph Hall’s observation of the Martian moons and Giovanni Schiaparelli’s observations of Mars’ canals sparked a great interest in Mars not just as an object, but as a place .

It is perhaps for this reason—its plausible placeness—that the moon has been the subject of stories about space travel for much longer. The earliest surviving Greco-Roman text about travel to the moon was written in the second century BC. It is Antonius Diogenes’ The Incredible Things Beyond Thule , a complex faux-memoir by an unnamed narrator. It describes the narrator’s journey to the ultimate northern reaches of the earth, and then, beyond, briefly, to the moon. Diogenes describes the moon as a ‘pure world’ ( γῆν καθαρωτάτην). As Karen ní Mheallaigh points out in her recent book about the moon in Greek thought, the word for ‘pure’, καθαρός , is double-edged. Alongside its connotations of untouched beauty, it can also mean ‘sterile’.

In the early second century AD the satirist Lucian expanded on the theme of lunar travel in two of his works, Icaromenippus and True Stories . In Icaromenippus , the protagonist Menippus flies to the moon and looks down on the earth, contemplating his previous life from a distance. In True Stories , Lucian and his shipmates are recruited into a war between the inhabitants of the moon and the inhabitants of the sun. There are extensive descriptions of the moon people and their way of life: they are all male but reproduce through a hermaphroditic process, they have removable eyes, and they sweat milk. In their oddness, the moon people serve as a foil to think about the stranger features of human biology and culture.

A 1983 East German postcard that commemorates 25 years since the launch of Sputnik 1.

A 1983 East German postcard that commemorates 25 years since the launch of Sputnik 1, and declares Lucian to be the father of space travel.

What are the conditions necessary to imagine the moon, other planets, or space itself as places one might visit? First, places have to be made of something. Many Bronze-Age cultures, including those in the Mediterranean, discussed the planets primarily as gods. By the Classical Greek period, some texts theorised about the physical make-up of the sun, moon, and stars. In most cases, the heavenly bodies were claimed to be made of fire, but Aristotle posited that they were made instead of a mysterious fifth element called aether. Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon (late second century AD) is, by contrast, one of the first texts that suggests that the moon is physically like the earth, made of rock. The idea of placing one’s feet on the moon suddenly becomes possible with this insight.

An illustration of Icaromenippus from the frontispiece of a book called A Voyage in Space.

An illustration of Icaromenippus from the frontispiece of a book called A Voyage in Space by an astronomy professor called Herbert Hall Turner, who adapted it from some lectures he delivered at Christmas 1913.

Second, when we plan journeys, we want some idea of how far we will go. Greek mathematicians undertook speculative calculations about the size of heavenly bodies and their distance from the earth. In the third century BC, Aristarchus estimated the moon to be at a remove of 20 x the radius of the earth. Soon after, Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth at around 252,000 stadia (c.29,000 miles, only 5,000 miles off the real value). Lucian’s Icaromenippus mocks mathematicians for their apparent certainty about the distance to the moon and claims instead that direct experience is the route to knowledge of the moon—but he is able to do so exactly because physical theories about the moon give him an acute sense of its physical reality.

Although modern science and pop culture are still fixated with Mars, the increasing possibility of commercial space travel returns us to the ancient question: what does it take for a part of the universe to become a place?

Claire Hall is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

More from the Blog

Destination Moon: The 350-Year History of Lunar Exploration (Infographic)

From ancient times, humans looked at the moon and wondered what it was, and if it were possible to go there. Prior to the invention of the telescope, people thought the moon was simply a glowing disc in the sky, and planets were moving points of light. Nothing else was known about them.

When 17th-century Italian astronomer Galileo first pointed a crude telescope at the moon, he noted that the orb had terrain including mountains, flat plains and craters. Therefore, the moon was solid, and its surface might be walked upon.

English mathematician Isaac Newton in the late 1600s reasoned that a cannon shell fired from a tall mountain would be pulled down to the Earth by gravity (diagram, above). A shell fired with a speed of 24,000 feet per second (7,300 meters per second) would fall continuously around the curve of the Earth . It would be in orbit. If the shell were fired even faster, it would leave the Earth and head into space. Such speed would require fuel with a great amount of propulsive energy that would not be available for about another 250 years.

Moon-Shots: Apollo Astronauts Remember

Early moon-voyage stories usually featured balloons, birds or dreams as the mode of travel. French novelist Jules Verne’s 1865 novel "From the Earth to the Moon" imagines travelers shot around the moon by a giant cannon. In reality, the acceleration from such a blast would kill the occupants, but at least the physics was correct.

By the start of the 20th century, technology had advanced to the point that space travel began to seem achievable. The Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903 worked out his rocket equation, a mathematical basis for space propulsion . It was later realized that a British mathematician had discovered the same equation in 1813, while studying how artillery works.

The first film to show realistic scenes of space travel, Fritz Lang's "The Woman in the Moon" (1929), relied on the advice of Romanian rocket scientist Hermann Oberth. The spacecraft, called "Friede," anticipated real technologies such as multiple stages and liquid fuel. The design was so plausible, the German Gestapo confiscated the rocket blueprints in the 1930s.

In World War II, Nazi Germany developed rockets to bombard enemy cities. The country's rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, used slave labor in concentration camps to build more than 3,000 A-4 rockets (also called V-2). Ultimately, more people died making the rockets than the weapons killed and wounded in the target cities. 

After the war, German rocket scientists captured by the United States and Soviet Union worked to develop massive new rockets for those countries' nuclear weapons and space exploration programs. Wernher von Braun appeared in the media of the 1950s, popularizing nuclear-powered rockets, space stations and trips to the moon. His ideas heavily influenced entertainment of the day.

How the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Worked (Infographic)

Von Braun envisioned huge expeditions to the moon and Mars. His enormous moon lander would have been assembled in Earth orbit by a space station crew. The entire lunar expedition would consist of three such vehicles, and would have carried a crew of 50 to the moon in 1977.

By the late 1950s, both the United States and Soviet Union were developing ever more powerful rockets to loft the massive hydrogen bombs of that time. Of course, those rockets could also be used to put satellites in space .

In the early 1960s, to counter the spectacular space achievements of the Soviet Union, U.S. President John F. Kennedy asked what technological project would be so bold as to impress the entire world. In 1962, Kennedy announced that America would choose to go to the moon within the decade.

NASA's Mighty Saturn V Moon Rocket Explained (Infographic)

In 1960, the Apollo spacecraft was planned as a follow-up to the one-man Mercury capsule . For lunar exploration, the entire 66-foot-tall (20 m) Apollo would be launched directly to the moon and would have to land vertically.

Because of the problems of landing such a huge vehicle and storing the large amount of fuel required, some at NASA considered other options. John C. Houbolt (below) championed the lunar orbit rendezvous concept. Apollo would be split in two: a command module, which would not land, and a separate lunar excursion vehicle, or "bug." The vehicles would link up in lunar orbit once the surface exploration was done.

NASA's Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Pictures

NASA's 17 Apollo Moon Missions in Pictures

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Karl's association with Space.com goes back to 2000, when he was hired to produce interactive Flash graphics. From 2010 to 2016, Karl worked as an infographics specialist across all editorial properties of Purch (formerly known as TechMediaNetwork).  Before joining Space.com, Karl spent 11 years at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, creating news graphics for use around the world in newspapers and on the web.  He has a degree in graphic design from Louisiana State University and now works as a freelance graphic designer in New York City.

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The Moon Landing

The historic event captivated the world—and helped people look to the future.

On July 20, 1969, millions of people gathered around their televisions to watch two U.S. astronauts do something no one had ever done before. Wearing bulky space suits and backpacks of oxygen to breathe, Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon .

After the two stepped onto the lunar surface, Armstrong proclaimed these famous words: “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Humans were only able to make that small step after several other space firsts happened. In 1957 the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space by Russia . The United States launched several satellites of their own afterward. Both countries hoped to be the first to send a human into space.

It wasn’t until 1961 that a person went to space: On April 12, Russia’s Yuri Gagarin became the first. Less than a month later the United States’ Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Following these milestones, President John F. Kennedy issued a challenge to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to put a human on the moon in 10 years or less.

NASA went to work. On July 16, 1969, the spacecraft Apollo 11 prepared to launch a crew of three astronauts into space … and the history books.

NASA officials selected Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins as the astronauts who would make the historic trip from Earth on Apollo 11. Just four days after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida , the spacecraft neared the moon’s surface.

Before touching down, the three men split up. Collins boarded Apollo 11’s command module, the Columbia, where he would remain in orbit around the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin boarded Apollo 11’s lunar module, the Eagle, and began to descend to the moon’s surface.

The Eagle made a risky landing in a shallow moon crater named the Sea of Tranquility. (Most people watching the landing on TV didn’t know that the Eagle had only 20 seconds of landing fuel left at this point.) Armstrong and Aldrin looked out the windows of the module at the lifeless and barren lunar landscape.

After six and a half hours pass, the pair inside the Eagle prepared to exit the module. As mission commander, Armstrong stepped out first … and became the first person on the moon.

Twenty minutes later, Aldrin climbed down the ladder and joined his partner. After reading a plaque that said they “came in peace for all mankind,” the two planted the United States’ flag on the surface. President Richard Nixon called to congratulate the astronauts.

Armstrong and Aldrin went back to work collecting samples of moon rocks and dust. After over two hours, the astronauts brought 47 pounds back onto the lunar module and prepared to rejoin Collins. It was time to go home.

DOWN TO EARTH

The Apollo 11 crew returned to Earth on July 24, 1969. Over the next several years, 10 astronauts would follow in Armstrong and Aldrin’s footsteps. The last mission to the moon was in 1972.

Though humans haven’t returned to the moon since, they have continued to explore space . They even built the International Space Station (ISS), a space research station, where they can conduct experiments and study space up close.

Today NASA is working on sending humans to another planet : Mars . Thanks to the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA is hopeful about its chances. The act of putting three people on the moon—and then safely bringing them back home—proved that successful human exploration in space is possible.

Text adapted from Ladders Earth Science: Exploring Above and Beyond by Stephanie Harvey and Space Encyclopedia: A Tour of Our Solar System and Beyond  by   David A. Aguilar and Patricia Daniels

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NASA announces 4 astronauts who will travel around the moon on Artemis II

The team includes the first woman and first person of color on a moon mission.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced Monday the four astronauts who will partake in the next Artemis mission and fly around the moon.

The Artemis II team will be made up of three Americans -- Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch and Reid Wiseman -- and one Canadian, Jeremy Hansen.

The team includes Koch as the first woman and Glover as the first person of color who will eventually go on to step foot on the lunar surface. Glover will be the pilot of the spacecraft and Wiseman will be the commander of Artemis II.

The agencies made the announcement at a media event at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston, Texas.

MORE: How Hurricane Nicole impacted Artemis I rocket

"We are here today with the mission to introduce the world to the crew of Artemis II for names, for explorers, for my friends, answering the call to once more rocket away from Earth, and chart a course around the moon," Joe Acaba, chief of NASA's astronaut office, said at the start of the event.

Glover, 46, will be the first person of color to voyage to the moon. Glover was selected by NASA as an astronaut in 2013 and most recently served as a pilot and second-in-command on the Crew-1 SpaceX Crew Dragon in 2020.

He has spent roughly 167 days in space. According to NASA, Glover was the first African American astronaut to join a long-duration expedition crew aboard the International Space Station.

"We need to celebrate this moment in human history because Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon and back," Glover said. "It's more than a mission that has to happen before we send people to the surface of the moon. It is the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars and this crew, we'll never forget that."

PHOTO: Crew assignments for the four astronauts who will venture around the Moon on Artemis II are Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist 1 Christina Hammock Koch, and Mission Specialist 2 Jeremy Hansen.

Koch, 43, made history with fellow astronaut Jessica Mer in October 2019 when they performed the first all-female spacewalk together.

Koch was also selected as an astronaut in 2013 and has completed six spacewalks. She currently holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days.

"We're not going to go to the moon right away," she said. "We're gonna stay in an amazing high orbit, reaching a peak of tens of thousands of miles while we test out all the systems on Orion and even see how it maneuvers in space. And then if everything looks good, we're heading to the moon."

Wiseman, 47, is a decorated naval aviator who was selected to be an astronaut in June 2009.

In 2014, he served as a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station and, over a 165-day mission, completed more than 300 experiments with his crewmates. Wiseman recently served as chief of the astronaut office, but stepped down in November because the chief is unable to fly in space.

MORE: Artemis I Orion capsule splashes down after NASA mission near moon

Hansen, 47, was a fighter pilot before he joined the CSA and he currently helps NASA with astronaut training and mission operations.

Not only will this be Hansen's first mission in space but he will also be the first Canadian to ever travel to the moon.

President Joe Biden congratulated the team in a tweet Monday, which included a video of him speaking with the Artemis II team.

"Look, I want to thank you for your incredible service," Biden said in the clip. "The mission you're about to go on, the United States can return people to the moon. It's hard to believe for the first time in over 50 years."

It comes after the Artemis I mission was completed in December last year after spending 25.5 days in space and making a 1.4-million-mile journey around the moon, according to NASA.

Artemis I was the first step of NASA's ambitious plan to establish a long-term presence on the moon and, later on, to send a crewed shuttle to Mars.

Artemis II is scheduled to send four astronauts into space in 2024 for a lunar flyby before returning to Earth.

PHOTO: Crew assignments for the four astronauts who will venture around the Moon on Artemis II are Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist 1 Christina Hammock Koch, and Mission Specialist 2 Jeremy Hansen.

It will be the first crewed mission aboard NASA's new Orion spacecraft and the first to launch on the agency's new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System.

"With Artemis I, we set out to prove that the hardware was ready, that SLS was prepared to launch our astronauts skyward, that Orion was equipped to carry them to the moon and back safely again," said Norman Knight, director of Flight Operations Directorate at NASA. "Artemis I was a resounding success and Artemis II will leverage that by putting humans in the loop."

The mission will take approximately 10 days, but the system will need to undergo massive amounts of testing first to make sure it can support humans living and working in deep space, NASA said.

This will be the first set of missions that NASA has used to send a crew to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972, more than 50 years ago.

The mission broke several records including the longest spacewalk and largest lunar samples brought back to Earth and also involved several experiments, including sending five mice into space with the crew.

MORE: On anniversary of NASA's Webb telescope reaching destination, here are the most striking images so far

"Over the course of the Artemis missions, the first woman and the first person of color will take giant leaps, on the lunar surface," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

In total, the Artemis expedition includes four missions, each of which will cost roughly $4.1 billion. The project will cost up to $93 billion by 2025, according to an audit from the NASA Office of the Inspector General.

Artemis III plans to send four astronauts to the moon in 2025 while Artemis IV plans to be the second lunar landing in 2027.

PHOTO: This Nov. 19, 1969 file photo released by NASA shows one of the astronauts of the Apollo 12 space mission on the Moon, standing by the US flag on the Moon and the Saturn V lunar module.

In addition to setting up a permanent base camp on the moon, the program aims to be the gateway to eventual human missions to Mars.

"Under Artemis, we will explore the frontiers of space and push the boundaries of what's possible," said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "You may walk on the moon or be one of the many explorers who venture onward to Mars. We're all looking forward to you being a part of our mission."

ABC News' Gina Sunseri contributed to this report.

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A brief history of moon exploration

In the 1950s, the Cold War sparked a race to visit Earth's moon with flybys, robots, and crewed missions. Here's what we discovered—and what's next.

For as long as humans have gazed skyward, the moon has been a focus of fascination. We could always see our cosmic partner’s mottled, cratered face by eye. Later, telescopes sharpened our views of its bumps, ridges, and relict lava seas. Finally, in the mid-20th century, humans visited Earth’s moon and saw its surface up close.

Since then, a volley of spacecraft have studied our nearest celestial neighbor, swooping low over its dusty plains and surveying its curious far side. Now, after six decades of exploration, we are once again aiming to send humans to the lunar surface.

Early forays into space

The earliest forays into lunar exploration were a product of the ongoing Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union sent uncrewed spacecraft to orbit and land on the moon.

The Soviets scored an early victory in January 1959, when Luna 1 , a small Soviet sphere bristling with antennas, became the first spacecraft to escape Earth’s gravity and ultimately fly within about 4,000 miles of the moon’s surface. (Read more about early spaceflight.)

Later in 1959, Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to make contact with the moon's surface when it crashed in the Mare Imbrium basin near the Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus craters. That same year, a third Luna mission captured the first, blurry images of the far side of the moon—where the rugged highland terrain is markedly different from the smoother basins on the side closest to Earth.

Then, the U.S. got in the game with nine NASA Ranger spacecraft that launched between 1961 and 1965, and gave scientists the first close-up views of the moon’s surface. The Ranger missions were daring one-offs, with spacecraft engineered to streak toward the moon and capture as many images as possible before crashing onto its surface. By 1965, images from all the Ranger missions, particularly Ranger 9 , had revealed greater detail about the moon’s rough terrain and the potential challenges of finding a smooth landing site for humans.

In 1966, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 became the first vehicle to land safely on the lunar surface. Stocked with scientific and communications equipment, the small spacecraft photographed a ground-level lunar panorama. Later that year, Luna 10 launched, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit the moon.

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NASA also landed a spacecraft on the moon’s surface that year with the first of its Surveyor space probes , which carried cameras to explore the moon's surface and soil samplers to analyze lunar rock and dirt. Over the two years that followed, NASA launched five Lunar Orbiter missions that were designed to circle the moon and chart its surface in preparation for the ultimate goal: landing astronauts on the surface. These orbiters photographed about 99 percent of the moon's surface, revealing potential landing sites and paving the way for a giant leap forward in space exploration. (See a map of all lunar landings.)

Humans on the moon

At the time, NASA was racing to fulfill a presidential promise: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a person on the moon before the decade was complete. The Apollo program , by far the most expensive spaceflight endeavor in history , kicked off that year, and by the time it ended in 1972, nine missions and 24 astronauts had orbited or landed on the moon.

Perhaps the most famous of those, Apollo 11 , marked the first time humans had stepped on another world.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in the lunar lander Eagle, while astronaut Michael Collins orbited the moon in the command module Columbia. Armstrong, who pressed the first bootprints into the moon’s surface, famously said , “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The pair stayed on the moon’s surface for 21 hours and 36 minutes before rendezvousing with Collins and heading back to Earth. ( Exploring the legacy of Apollo 11 at the dawn of a new era of space travel. )

Each mission after Apollo 11 set new milestones in space travel and lunar exploration. Four months after the first humans reached the moon, Apollo 12 touched down, achieving a much more precise landing on the moon.

Apollo 13 narrowly avoided a near-disaster when on-board oxygen tanks exploded in April 1970, forcing the crew to abort a planned moon landing. All three survived.

During the third lunar landing, in January 1971, Apollo 14 , commander Alan Shepard set a new record for the farthest distance traveled on the moon: 9,000 feet. He even lobbed a few golf balls into a nearby crater with a makeshift 6-iron .

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Apollo 15 , launched in July 1971, was the first of three missions capable of a longer stay on the moon. In the course of three days spent on the lunar surface, achievements included collecting hundreds of pounds of lunar samples and traveling more than 17 miles in the first piloted moon buggy. (The Soviet Union had sent a remotely controlled rover to the moon , Lunokhod 1, in 1970.)

Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 in 1972 were the two most recent crewed missions to the moon, and Russia’s Luna-24 crewless spacecraft in 1976 was the last to land until the following century. Samples collected during these lunar explorations produced huge amounts of knowledge about the geology and formation of the Earth’s moon . (See a timeline of the space race and its modern-day version in private spaceflight.)

After the dramatic accomplishments of the 1960s and 1970s, the major space agencies turned their attention elsewhere for several decades. So far, only 12 humans—all Americans and all men—have set foot on the moon.

Moon curiosity builds again

It wasn’t until 1994 that the moon came back into focus for the United States, with a joint mission between NASA and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. The Clementine spacecraft mapped the moon's surface in wavelengths other than visible light, from ultraviolet to infrared . Hiding in the more than 1.8 million digital photos it captured were hints of ice in some of the moon’s craters.

In 1999, the Lunar Prospector orbited the moon, confirming Clementine’s discovery of ice at the lunar poles, a resource that could be crucial for any long-term lunar settlement. The mission's end was spectacular: Prospector slammed into the moon, intending to create a plume that could be studied for evidence of water ice but none was observed. (Ten years later, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft repeated this experiment and found evidence for water in a shadowed region near the moon’s south pole .)

Since 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken high-resolution maps of the lunar surface. Between 2011 and 2012, it was joined in orbit by NASA’s twin GRAIL probes —named Ebb and Flow—which mapped the moon’s gravitational field before intentionally crashing into a region near the lunar north pole.

The recent—and future—status of moon exploration

NASA isn’t the only space agency with a surging interest in the moon. Within the last two decades, lunar exploration has gone truly international—and even commercial.

In 2007, Japan launched its first lunar orbiter, SELENE . China launched its first lunar spacecraft the same year, and India followed suit in 2008. By 2013, China became the third country to successfully land on the lunar surface, when its Chang’e-3 spacecraft deployed the Yutu rover.

More milestones—both for better and worse—were achieved in 2019. In January, another Chinese lander, Yutu-2, made history by becoming the first rover to touch down on the lunar farside . Meanwhile, India’s second lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-2 , unsuccessfully deployed a small lander, Vikram , on the lunar surface that year. (India’s space agency hopes to try again in 2021 .) And in April 2019 Israel aimed for the moon with the launch of its Beresheet spacecraft . Unfortunately, even though the spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, it crashed during its attempt to land.

Unlike other spacecraft that came before it, Beresheet was built largely with private funding , heralding a new era of lunar exploration in which private companies are hoping to take the reins from governments.

NASA, for one, is partnering with commercial spaceflight companies to develop both robotic and crewed landers for lunar exploration; among those companies are SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin have announced the goal of establishing a lunar base near the south pole where people could work and live. SpaceX is developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to the moon and Mars , and is also developing a plan to bring tourists to lunar orbit. ( The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars .)

And not to be overshadowed by the commercial sector, NASA is planning its own ambitious return to the moon. The agency’s Artemis program, a sister to the venerable Apollo project, aims to put the first woman—and the next man— on the moon by 2024 . The backbone of Artemis is NASA’s Orion space capsule , currently in development, although the agency is also partnering with private companies to achieve its goal.

If Artemis goes well, then the near future might also see NASA and partners developing a space station in lunar orbit that could serve as a gateway to destinations on the moon’s surface—and beyond.

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All About the Moon

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Chances are that when you imagine the night sky, one of the first things that comes to mind is the Moon “glowing” in the darkness. The Moon has always held a special place in our imaginations and in daily life.

Explore the Moon! Click and drag to rotate the Moon. Scroll or pinch to zoom in and out. Credit: NASA Visualization Technology Applications and Development (VTAD)

It’s no wonder that we are fascinated. The Moon is Earth’s only natural satellite and one that we can easily see most nights.

An image of the Moon that appeared in a 1902 French film called Le Voyage dans la Lune

The Moon has inspired wonder and creativity for thousands of years. This image appeared in a 1902 French film called "Le Voyage dans la Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon").

What makes the Moon glow?

The Moon does not shine with its own light. It simply reflects light coming from the Sun.

The face of the Moon that we see from Earth.

This is the face of the Moon that we see from Earth. This image is based on data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Why does it look like the Moon is changing shape?

From Earth, it might look like the Moon is changing shape each night – from a tiny sliver to a half moon to a full moon and back again. What’s actually happening is that from our spot on Earth, we see different parts of the Moon lit up by the Sun as the Moon travels in its orbit.

This graphic shows all eight moon phases we see as the Moon makes a complete orbit of Earth about every four weeks.

As the Moon travels around Earth, different parts of it are lit up by the Sun. These changes in the Moon's appearance from our view on Earth are called moon phases. This graphic shows all eight moon phases we see as the Moon makes a complete orbit of Earth about every four weeks. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Is there actually a “dark side" of the Moon?

No. The Moon rotates on its own axis at the same rate that it orbits around Earth. That means we always see the same side of the Moon from our position on Earth. The side we don't see gets just as much light, so a more accurate name for that part of the Moon is the "far side."

We only ever see one side of the Moon because as it orbits around Earth, it also rotates on its own axis at the same speed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image of the far side of the Moon

The "far side" of the Moon looks very different than the near side (see the first photo in this article). Notice how few dark areas the far side has. This image is based on data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University

How did the Moon form?

Scientists believe that the Moon formed early in the solar system’s history after Earth and an object about the size of Mars smashed into each other. The impact sent chunks of Earth and the impactor into space that were pulled together by gravity, creating the Moon.

How do we study the Moon?

Even thousands of years ago, humans drew pictures to track the changes of the Moon. Later, people used their observations of the Moon to create calendars.

Today, we study the Moon using telescopes and spacecraft. For example, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the Moon and sending back measurements since 2009.

The Moon is the only other planetary body that humans have visited. On July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the dusty surface of the Moon. Ten other American astronauts followed. They collected hundreds of pounds of lunar soil and rock samples, conducted experiments and installed equipment for follow-up measurements.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin set up several scientific experiments while on the surface of the Moon during the historic Apollo 11 mission. You can see the lunar module, “Eagle,” in the background.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin set up several scientific experiments while on the surface of the Moon during the historic Apollo 11 mission. You can see the lunar module, “Eagle,” in the background. Credit: NASA

What do we know about the Moon?

Today, we know that the Moon is covered by craters as well as dust and debris from comets, asteroids and meteoroid impacts. We know that the Moon’s dark areas, called maria – which is Latin for seas – are not actually seas. Instead, they are craters that lava seeped into billions of years ago. We know that the Moon has almost no atmosphere and only about one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. We even know that there is quite a bit of frozen water tucked away in craters near the Moon's poles.

Image of the surface of the Moon covered with the remains of old and new impacts.

There is no wind or air on the Moon to help “erase” craters, so the surface is covered with the remains of old and new impacts. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

There are still many questions left to answer about the Moon. And the most exciting days of lunar activity may still lie ahead as NASA sends humans on the next missions to the Moon and eventually on to Mars!

For more information visit:

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More about the Moon!

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How far away is the Moon?

Tycho Crater, in the moon's southern hemisphere.

Why does the Moon have craters?

A blood moon against the night sky in 2014.

What are the different types of full moons?

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NASA is set to return to the moon. Here are 4 reasons to go back

Scott Neuman

moon travel story

Astronaut Charlie M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, is photographed collecting lunar samples during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity at the Descartes landing site. John W. Young/NASA hide caption

Astronaut Charlie M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, is photographed collecting lunar samples during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity at the Descartes landing site.

President John F. Kennedy delivered a famous speech in 1962 outlining his administration's challenge to land Americans on the moon. "We choose to go to the moon," he declared, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

As difficult a technological feat as the Apollo moon program proved, within seven years NASA had met Kennedy's challenge and ultimately sent a dozen astronauts to the surface on six missions between 1969 and 1972 at a cost of about $25 billion — roughly $250 billion in today's dollars.

Artemis: NASA's New Chapter In Space

Artemis: NASA's New Chapter In Space

Sixty years after Kennedy's speech, NASA is again getting ready to send humans to the moon . Proving that rocket science is still hard, NASA will be making a third attempt on Wednesday to launch the uncrewed Artemis I after two previous launches were scrubbed due to technical issues. Once it finally gets off the ground, the mission will be the first test flight of the hardware that will be used to send astronauts in the next few years.

No doubt, many people are wondering: Why go back?

There's a lot of science to be done on the moon

The rock samples brought back by Apollo astronauts decades ago taught scientists a lot about the geologic history of Earth and the moon .

What can be gathered by today's astronauts could tell us even more, says David Kring, a lunar geologist at the Center for Lunar Science & Exploration in Houston, Texas.

It's easier to set down a spacecraft near the moon's equator, so that's where all six Apollo landings occurred. But now, NASA has more ambitious aims.

In August, just ahead of the first launch attempt, NASA announced 13 possible landing sites , each in the south pole region, where water ice has been confirmed deep inside craters that never see sunlight. A crewed lunar flyby, Artemis II, is anticipated for 2024. And the first crewed landing, Artemis III, could come as early as 2025.

moon travel story

A rendering of 13 candidate landing regions for Artemis III. Each region is approximately 9.3 miles by 9.3 miles. A landing site is a location within those regions with an approximate 328-foot radius. NASA hide caption

A rendering of 13 candidate landing regions for Artemis III. Each region is approximately 9.3 miles by 9.3 miles. A landing site is a location within those regions with an approximate 328-foot radius.

The sites "are some of the best places to go for lunar geology and understanding lunar ice and sampling lunar ice," says Bethany Ehlmann, associate director of the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology.

The Artemis Moon mission moves NASA into new era of space exploration

Kring calls the lunar south pole region "absolutely extraordinary geologic terrain."

"If you really want to understand the origin of the evolution of the solar system, there is no better place ... to go [than] the moon," Kring says. Because the moon has never had an atmosphere or flowing water, it is not subject to weathering and erosion and has thus preserved evidence of its origin, he says.

As technology has steadily improved in the decades since Apollo, the level of detail on the moon's surface revealed by such probes as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter "is so extraordinary that we've already identified rocks on the lunar surface that we want the astronauts to collect," Kring says.

moon travel story

Illustration of SpaceX Starship human lander design that will carry the first Artemis astronauts to the surface of the moon. SpaceX hide caption

Illustration of SpaceX Starship human lander design that will carry the first Artemis astronauts to the surface of the moon.

Having astronaut boots on the moon has other advantages, too, says Craig Hardgrove, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. He considers himself "a huge fan of robotic exploration," but nonetheless acknowledges that rovers and landers are limited by the scientific instruments they carry with them. They also have a harder time capturing as much data on the detailed geologic context and landscape as an astronaut trained in geology can.

Humans, by contrast, "are able to collect a large number of samples much quicker than robots," says Hardgrove, who is principal investigator of the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper ( LunaH-Map ) mission, set to launch aboard the Artemis I rocket. The shoebox-size probe aims to pinpoint the location of polar ice deposits.

With astronauts selecting the best samples and bringing them home, laboratories and universities can examine them with a wider range of sophisticated tools, he says. "If we can bring them back to Earth, I think we have a much better shot at answering even more questions than we can if we're limited to rovers."

It's a stepping stone to Mars

Mars is at least 200 times farther from Earth than the moon, which means an enormous challenge in keeping astronauts safe from such things as radiation exposure, Hardgrove says.

"The launch windows to get to Mars are once every two years," he says. "So, we would be thinking about keeping our astronauts on the surface of Mars for a long period of time. I personally feel like we would be doing them a service and everyone a service if we test out all these technologies on the moon first."

moon travel story

This image of the parachute that helped deliver NASA's Perseverance Mars rover to the Martian surface was taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument in April. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS hide caption

This image of the parachute that helped deliver NASA's Perseverance Mars rover to the Martian surface was taken by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument in April.

Apollo was mostly about beating the Soviet Union to the moon. It succeeded, but there was no long-term plan to create a sustainable human presence there.

Artemis could change that, says Clive Neal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and Earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. He's especially keen to see a gradual shift toward a permanent human presence on the moon.

Given that SpaceX, a commercial venture, has been chosen to provide the vehicle that will land Artemis astronauts on the lunar surface, that prospect may not be as far off as once thought.

"We need to build an infrastructure that's going to say, 'OK, we're going to have human permanence on the moon and transition to commercial operations there in the future,'" Neal says. "And we can have a blueprint then at the moon of how to do these things sustainably that can be applied to more distant destinations."

It could spur new technologies

Dozens of new technologies created to go into space and to the moon have also brought substantial benefits to people on Earth — spawning everything from hand-held computers to insulin pumps and freeze-dried food.

Artemis could spark similar innovations.

moon travel story

The core technology used in dialysis machines was first developed for NASA. Science Photo Library/Getty Images hide caption

A 2013 study commissioned by NASA estimates that commercial products emerging from the space agency's research return between $100 million and $1 billion annually to the U.S. economy. Many of those "spinoffs" had their origin in the Apollo program.

The Apollo Guidance Computer , for example, was a technological marvel of its day. It was an early demonstration of digital fly-by-wire technology that is used in modern passenger jets and military aircraft.

Space Spinoffs: The Technology To Reach The Moon Was Put To Use Back On Earth

The Apollo 11 Moon Landing, 50 Years Later

Space spinoffs: the technology to reach the moon was put to use back on earth.

"We're still reaping the rewards of miniaturization of electronics that happened during Apollo," Neal says. "Think about mobile phones. This is a technology that maybe would not have happened without Apollo."

New flame-retardant fabrics first developed for spacesuits, to withstand very high temperatures and still remain lightweight, are found today in clothing to protect firefighters around the country.

A "super insulation" developed for NASA in the 1960s can now be "found hidden inside the walls and roofs of buildings, in cryogenic tanks and MRI machines, in winter gear, and in cases for electronic devices, among other applications," according to NASA.

It has the potential to inspire a generation of engineers and scientists

It's often said that the Apollo moonshot inspired thousands of new engineers and scientists. While numbers are impossible to quantify, according to a 2009 survey of 800 researchers , "the Moon landings deserve credit for motivating a large fraction of today's scientists ... who have published in Nature in the past three years."

moon travel story

Workers prepare the Psyche spacecraft inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in April. After a delay, Psyche, which will enter orbit in space around an asteroid, is expected to launch next year. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Workers prepare the Psyche spacecraft inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in April. After a delay, Psyche, which will enter orbit in space around an asteroid, is expected to launch next year.

With Artemis, "we're going to get nearly live video from the surface of the moon and people are going to start thinking about the moon as a real place," Hardgrove, of ASU, says.

"I think it can absolutely be inspirational, hopefully not just for people like me, but [also] people who may not be thinking about careers in space exploration or engineering," he says.

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An illustration of Nasa’s new space launch system, which will take humans back to the moon.

To the moon and beyond: what 2022 holds for space travel

From lunar missions to anti-asteroid defence systems, there are plenty of exciting scientific developments to look forward to

T his year promises to be an important one for space exploration, with several major programmes reaching the launch pad over the next 12 months. The US is to return to the moon, undertaking a set of missions intended to establish a lunar colony there in a few years. China is expected to complete its Tiangong space station while Europe and Russia will attempt to land spacecraft on Mars, having failed at every previous attempt. India, South Korea and Japan are also scheduled to put a number of missions into space.

A mockup of Nasa’s Orion space capsule, which will carry four astronauts in future missions to the moon, an asteroid or Mars.

Particular interest is going to focus on Nasa’s mighty new space launch system (SLS). This is the most powerful rocket it has ever designed and has been built to carry astronauts to the moon and beyond as part of the agency’s Artemis deep space exploration programme. With these missions, Nasa intends to reopen the solar system to investigation by humans – rather than robot probes – and regularly carry astronauts to the lunar surface.

The programme’s first launch is scheduled for February when an SLS rocket – standing more than 300ft high – will carry an unmanned Orion capsule on a trajectory that will enter a highly elliptical orbit round the moon. At its closest, the spaceship will sweep within 62 miles of the lunar surface before soaring 40,000 miles above it, a distance that will take it further from Earth than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.

Crucially, Orion – designed to carry between four and six astronauts when fully operational – will be fitted with a European service module that will provide the capsule’s power and propulsion for manoeuvring in orbit. This will give its manufacturer – the European Space Agency – the opportunity to become a key partner in future Artemis missions. If February’s mission succeeds, a crewed trip around the moon will take place in 2024 and this will be followed by a lunar landing in 2025 – a gap of 53 years since Apollo 17, the last crewed moon mission, touched down on the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972.

This time the crew will include at least one woman and the mission will mark the beginning of a programme aimed at establishing a lunar colony where astronauts would work on months-long missions and develop technologies that could be used by future colonies on Mars . A prime target for the first lunar outpost is Shackleton crater, near the moon’s south pole, which is believed to hold reservoirs of ice. Water will not only provide precious sustenance for astronauts, it can be exploited as a source of hydrogen and oxygen – by electrolysis – that can be combined as rocket fuel.

Landers built by private companies with Nasa’s backing will carry science and technology missions to the lunar surface.

As part of its preparations to establish a lunar colony, Nasa will also start a massive programme of robot missions through the agency’s $2.6bn commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative. This will involve sending a flotilla of robot spacecraft to the moon, with the first missions beginning this year. Built by private companies with Nasa backing, these probes will attempt to map underground water deposits, study the moon’s deep interior and release robot rovers to investigate the lunar surface. Fledgling space company Astrobotic will send its newly designed Peregrine lander to Lacus Mortis – “the lake of death” – a plain of basaltic rock in the north-eastern part of the moon. It will carry 11 different payloads of instruments and will be followed by another US company, Intuitive Machines, which is sending a spacecraft carrying six payloads to Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms.

A further 12 CLPS missions are scheduled for the next three years, though head of Nasa science, Thomas Zurbuchen, has warned that these privately funded efforts each face a high risk of failure. As many as half could go wrong, he said recently.

For good measure, Russia and India are both planning to launch their own lunar landers next year, while South Korea is scheduled to place a satellite in moon orbit to study its mineral composition.

A working prototype of the ExoMars rover at the Airbus Defense Space facility in Stevenage.

The hunt for alien life will take a step further this year with the launch of the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission , which will land a robot rover on the Oxia Planum, a 125-mile-wide clay-bearing plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The rover – named after Rosalind Franklin, the British chemist and DNA pioneer – will be fitted with a drill capable of probing several feet below the Martian surface, where it is hoped primitive lifeforms may survive or at least the remnants of extinct organisms. The 660lb rover was built by Airbus Defence and Space, at the company’s UK facility in Stevenage. Launch is scheduled for 22 September and touchdown is expected on 10 June 2023.

Hopes of success for the mission are guarded, however, as neither Russia nor Europe has had any luck in landing on Mars. Nineteen Russian and Soviet missions and two European bids to land on the red planet have all failed – including Europe’s Schiaparelli lander , which was intended to be a trial run for the current ExoMars mission but which crashed on the planet in 2016.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with the double asteroid redirection test, or Dart, spacecraft onboard in November.

Easily the most spectacular mission to the asteroids will be Nasa’s bid to test an anti-asteroid defence system for Earth. Launched last year, the double asteroid redirection test (Dart) spacecraft will crash into the moonlet Dimorphos in September. Hurtling into its target at 15,000mph, the 1,340lb probe – the size of a small car – will try to change the orbit of Dimorphos, a lump of rock the size of a football stadium, around its parent asteroid, Didymos.

If successful, Nasa and other space agencies will be encouraged to follow up the mission by developing craft that could deflect a larger asteroid heading towards Earth – and so avert an Armageddon -style impact, say astronomers. Should an asteroid the size of Dimorphos crash on Earth, it would trigger an explosion equivalent to 400-600 megatonnes of TNT. “A city like Manhattan would be completely obliterated,” Elena Adams, Dart’s systems engineer, told the journal Science . “This is to demonstrate a technique to save the world.”

Nasa has plans for several other asteroid missions next year, including the launch of the probe Psyche. Scheduled for lift-off in August, the spacecraft will visit an asteroid called 16 Psyche that is thought to be the leftover core of a planet. This vast chunk of nickel and iron is the remains of a violent collision with another astronomical object that stripped off the planet’s outer layers and left its metallic innards exposed. Studying 16 Psyche will give scientists an unprecedented opportunity to examine a planetary core. It will also afford them a chance to explore a new type of world – one that is made of metal.

Human spaceflight

Taikonauts Zhai Zhigang and Wang Yaping undertaking an extravehicular activities (EVA) outside the space station core module Tianhe in November.

Boeing will attempt to get its Starliner crew capsule into orbit so that it can begin to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). A 2019 flight failed to reach the station and another attempt last year was called off at the last minute when fuel valves failed to open. Boeing now plans to launch a crewless Starliner in early 2022, followed by a test flight with astronauts later in the year. The capsule will then be used – along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship – on a rota to ferry astronauts to the ISS.

For its part, China is expected to complete its space station Tiangong – Heavenly Palace – after launching the first of its three main modules, Tianhe, in April . Modules Mengtian and Wentian will be added this year. China has said it hopes to keep its space station – which is considerably smaller than the ISS – inhabited continuously by three astronauts for at least a decade. A key task for crewmen will be to service the Xuntian space telescope, which will be launched in 2024 and which will orbit in formation with the Tiangong station. Fitted with a mirror roughly the same size as the Hubble space telescope, Xuntian’s tasks will include investigations of dark matter and dark energy as well as galaxy formation and evolution.

Space tourism

Richard Branson observering the curve of the Earth from Virgin Galactic’s passenger rocket plane VSS Unity during his flight to the edge of space in July.

Blue Origin (founded by Jeff Bezos) and Virgin Galactic (set up by Richard Branson) both succeeded in launching maiden sub-orbital flights last year and both say they expect to begin regular missions in 2022, offering groups of tourists a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth.

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Japan moon lander put to sleep after surviving lunar night

Japan's moon lander survives a second weekslong lunar night, beating predictions

Japan's moon lander has been put back to sleep after it surprisingly survived the freezing, two-week lunar night, the country's space agency said, with another operation attempt scheduled for later this month.

The unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down in January at a wonky angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way.

As the sun's angle shifted, it came back to life for two days and carried out scientific observations of a crater with a high-spec camera.

This week, the SLIM probe, which was "not designed for the harsh lunar nights," when the temperature plunges to minus 133 degrees, produced another surprise by waking up after two weeks.

"SLIM has gone to sleep again as the sun set after 3 am (Japan Time) on March 1," the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday, alongside an image of the rocky lunar surface captured by the probe.

"Although the likelihood of failure will increase due to the severe temperature cycles, we will attempt SLIM operation again when the sunlight comes back in late March," JAXA said.

The announcement comes after the uncrewed American lander Odysseus became the first private spaceship on the moon.

The lander sent its final image on Thursday before its power banks depleted.

SLIM, dubbed the "Moon Sniper" for its precision landing technology, touched down within its target landing zone on January 20.

The feat was a win for Japan's space program after a string of recent failures, making the nation only the fifth to achieve a " soft landing " on the moon, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.

The aim of the mission is to examine a part of the moon's mantle—the usually deep inner layer beneath its crust—that is believed to be accessible.

NASA is planning to return astronauts to the moon later this decade.

The US, along with international partners, wants to eventually develop long-term habitats in the region, harvesting polar ice for drinking water—and for rocket fuel for eventual onward voyages to Mars.

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Here comes the new moon in Pisces — sit still in the dark and listen close

The dark side of the moon is on the rise, folks.

On March 10, 2024, the new moon in the sweet cereal milk of Pisces peaks at 4:59 AM EST, hours after we spring forward into Daylight Savings Time.

Ruling the twelfth house of secrets and endings, karmic reckoning, the subconscious and the supernatural, Pisces is a threshold sign, through and through.

The following weeks will see us welcome the spring equinox, which ushers us, torches blazing, into the adrenaline, cocaine heartbeat of Aries season — and later, a penumbral lunar eclipse and full solar eclipse.

Thus, this new moon lands/anti-shines on the precipice of great change and a baptism by fire.

Aries is the firstborn sign in the zodiac, synonymous with spring and the visceral, glorious violence of live birth.

By contrast, Pisces is the still sea before that storm, the cauldron that begets the stew, the seed in the dark soil that holds but hasn’t hatched. That energy of potential and the feeling of the thinning of the veil will be heightened by the proximity of the sun and moon to Neptune, planet of dreams and dissolution.

The new moon is always a time of introspection; when things go dark, we go in and dig deep but never is that call more powerful than in the moment of the Pisces new moon.

As Pisces operates from a place of intuition rather than logic, it feels before it thinks, it imagines before it analyzes, receives rather than reacts. This is the same modality we adopt when the lights go out and we must rely on sense rather than sight.

The intuitive, introspective energy of this new moon calls to mind the Buddhist belief in the 12 nidanas that make up the Wheel of Life and the sequence of all existence.

Also known as the 12 links of dependent origination, each link is the result of what came before it and the cause of what will come next. If we extrapolate this to the zodiac wheel, Pisces is the end of the line, or jaramarana .

It is here that the cycle completes itself, death transpires and the paths of involution and evolution present themselves.

In astrology, the upcoming spring equinox signifies the true onset of the new year; at the end of this line, in this last new moon before that year begins and the holy wheel spins again, what are we integrating and what are we obliterating? What have we learned and what are we prepared to lose in service of coming through anew?

The highest expression of Pisces is boundless compassion and universal, unconditional love while the slick belly of the fish is helplessness/victimhood bordering on nihilism. What divides these two expressions is not the experience of pain but a willingness to deepen and develop through it rather than to be defined by it.

Wisdom versus wallowing, if you will.

Pisces is synonymous with deep dives, with aggregates and endings — we can honor the metaphor of death through stillness. Etymologically, the word stillness is “to put in order,” as it is in the ceasing of momentum or motive that we are able to regenerate.

A gentle suggestion; under the new moon and the influence of the ‘possibilities without boundaries’ energy of Pisces, let yourself come down to the ground and into corpse pose or slip into a bathtub with the lights out.

With the earth at your back and the sky above, there is no limit to what can be found and felt, learned and left behind.

Artist, musician, doula, and self-professed “UNICORN Mutant Cobra jumpin time lines,” Erykah Badu was born with both her sun and moon in the tidal pools/pulls of Pisces.

When asked via Vulture how she views herself today versus two decades ago, Badu responded, “I’ve learned so many things since then. I’ve changed in a way that involves elimination for the sake of evolution. There’s less emphasis on trying to figure things out. It’s about letting things be. I’m focusing on listening to the silence underneath everything. That’s what I try to connect with. I can listen to the silence right here, right now while we’re talking, and it feels so good. I’m in love with the silence.”

On the edge of spring and the lip of this moon, I hope you will make like this Pisces prophet and eliminate to evolve, surrender needing to know in favor of wanting to accept, and find ways to sit still in the dark and listen close to the quiet.

Astrologer  Reda Wigle  researches and irreverently reports back on planetary configurations and their effect on each zodiac sign. Her horoscopes integrate history, poetry, pop culture, and personal experience. She is also an accomplished writer who has profiled a variety of artists and performers, as well as extensively chronicled her experiences while traveling. Among the many intriguing topics she has tackled are cemetery etiquette, her love for dive bars, Cuban Airbnbs, a “girl’s guide” to strip clubs, and the “weirdest” foods available abroad.

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31 Things to Do for the Big Eclipse This April

On April 8, the moon will blot out the sun along a roughly 4,200-mile-long, 115-mile-wide path across North America. Where will you watch it? Here are some ideas.

A young boy lying on the grass, with black-framed eclipse glasses on, wears a blue jumpsuit with NASA patches on it. He is pressing the glasses to his face with both hands.

By Danielle Dowling

Danielle Dowling, a Times editor with degrees in physics and science education, also reported on last October’s annular eclipse from Texas.

Wherever you go to catch the total solar eclipse on April 8, those three or four minutes of daytime darkness — no matter how spectacular — might not be enough.

You may want to build it out to a weekend’s worth of activities while staying somewhere fun or indulging in some self-care. Or maybe you would prefer to pair this bucket list event with another. After all, it will be about 21 years before another total solar eclipse of this magnitude returns to the contiguous United States.

With the path of totality starting on the Pacific coast of Mexico, heading northeast through 13 U.S. states and ending in Newfoundland, Canada, there are an overwhelming number of eclipse-oriented events to choose from, with something to satisfy just about any desire. Here are 31 options.

Hang out with NASA

Space nerds, kids at heart and actual children may appreciate a little guidance from NASA scientists, who will spread out across numerous celebrations along the eclipse’s path — at free or reasonably priced events in places like Mazatlán, Mexico; Austin, Dallas, Kerrville, Stonewall and Waco, Texas; Carbondale, Ill.; Cleveland; and Niagara Falls, N.Y. NASA has also teamed up with Purdue University and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for a day of track tours and STEM symposiums ($20) at the racetrack.

Get hitched

Among astrologers, a solar eclipse represents a new beginning, so it offers a rather auspicious backdrop for nuptials. At Total Eclipse of the Heart in Russellville, Ark. (April 6 to 8), you can come for the weekend of hot air balloons, barbecue and ax throwing, and stay for the mass wedding ceremony, which will be held minutes before the eclipse. Tickets are $100 for each day’s festivities (there’s no extra fee to get married); aspiring newlyweds must register for the ceremony at totaleclipserussellville.com/elope . At the Texclipse Music Festival in Junction, Texas (April 6 to 8), you can exchange vows en masse during the eclipse, as well as treat yourself to local entertainment and a chili cook-off. A weekend pass is $135, and the marriage fee is $100, which includes 10 photographs from the ceremony. For each festival, you will still need to apply for a marriage license beforehand (you’ll probably want to get on that as soon as possible).

Choose your soundtrack

Texas dominates the musical offerings with some big-name lineups. At the Texas Eclipse festival in Burnet (April 5 to 9), prepare to have your senses flooded. In addition to more than 100 acts, including Tiga , the Golden Dawn Arkestra and the Disco Biscuits , the festival will offer a dizzying array of entertainment, including an immersive experience by the arts collective Meow Wolf . A four-day general admission pass is $349, and accommodations range from car camping ($175) to a glamping tent ($1,750). In Waco, the Eclipse Over Texas festival will present free concerts, with Band of Horses on April 5 and Big Boi and Arrested Development on April 6. And over in Austin, at the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park, Vampire Weekend will serenade the sun as it slips into shadow on April 8 (it’s also the frontman Ezra Koenig’s 40th birthday). The show is sold out, but resale tickets are available through platforms like StubHub and Ticketmaster .

Arkansas will also bring the noise. Fans of underground music may want to head to Hot Springs, where the Ecliptic Festival (April 5 to 8) will feature acts like Blonde Redhead , Sun Ra Arkestra , Mary Lattimore , Deerhoof and Quintron . A four-day pass is $385, and day passes start at $70. Glamping packages range from $1,350 to $1,650; if you bring your own tent, camping costs $85 a night, or $300 for the weekend. About 200 miles northeast, in Dyess, you can celebrate the Man in Black before the sky turns black at Johnny Cash’s boyhood home . The event’s full weekend primitive camping package ($400) will get you a 20-by-20-foot spot to park and car camp from April 5 to 9, as well as four tickets to the Arkansas Roots Music Festival, taking place there on April 6. It will also get you four tickets to the NASA Lunch and Learn event on April 7, and four pairs of Johnny Cash Boyhood Home eclipse glasses. Unfortunately, Dyess lies just outside the path of totality, so you’ll need to drive about an hour west to see the eclipse in its full glory.

With the bluegrass musician Ricky Skaggs as one of the top names on its lineup, the Solar Strings festival (April 5 to 8) will fill its 700-plus-acre site in the Missouri Ozarks with the sounds of guitars, banjos, fiddles and more. A four-day general admission pass that includes car camping is $145; glamping packages are also available.

Ride the rails or hit the slopes

A few spots are still available aboard the Solar Eclipse Limited , whose fully restored Pullman cars will leave Penn Station in New York on April 7, headed for Niagara Falls, N.Y. There, the train will serve as a mini-hotel, providing food and accommodations as you take in the celestial sights. If its more-than-$8,000 price tag is a little too rich, you can travel to the village of Arcade, in western New York, and take a trip on the vintage Arcade & Attica Railroad , which will leave at 2 p.m. on April 8 and make a stop to view the totality at 3:19 p.m. Tickets are $22 for adults, $19 for children. If you prefer zipping through the snow, Smugglers’ Notch in Vermont is holding a weekend-long celebration capped off by a Winter Eclipse Carnival from noon to 4 p.m. on April 8.

Make a run for the border

Since the eclipse will start in Mexico and wrap up in eastern Canada, you have the option to go in either direction. If you head south, you’ll most likely be blessed with great weather (the probability of cloud cover in most Mexican towns and cities along the path averages about 20 to 30 percent). Mazatlán is the safest bet. Hotel rooms are still available and there’s an expansive boardwalk where you and your fellow eclipse watchers can gather to view the totality, which will last 4 minutes 27 seconds there.

Up in Canada, the rainbows that hover above Niagara Falls will turn red, as shorter wavelengths of light, like blue and green, are scattered more easily during totality. Prime eclipse-viewing spots in the area include the SkyWheel , the butterfly conservatory and Queen Victoria Park , where the Niagara Symphony Orchestra will kick off a free rock concert as the eclipse reaches its peak. In Montreal, you’ll be able to pair skyline views with daytime darkness on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Parc Jean-Drapeau has teamed up with the Space for Life planetarium to offer an afternoon of education and entertainment before the sun has its moment, all at no charge. The only drawback is that Montreal is on the edge of the path of totality, which means it will be in darkness for just a little over two minutes. (On the plus side, you’ll be in Montreal .)

Entertain the kids

If you’re taking your children to see the eclipse, they will need distractions. What’s better than an indoor water park, like the one at the Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky, Ohio? Near the centerline of the eclipse’s path, it’s well situated, and its viewing party will offer free wolf ears for the kids and moon pies for everyone. A family suite that includes unlimited access to the park averages nearly $330 a night. You can also find child-friendly activities if you’re willing to travel back in time. Kinmundy Log Cabin Village in Kinmundy, Ill., will open its grounds to visitors from April 6 to 8, and while you won’t be able to stay in one of its 19th-century log cabins, you can explore them, with some occupied by volunteers re-enacting pioneer life. There will be a bonfire each night, and food trucks will be on site on April 7 and 8. Camping and parking for all three days is $150. At the Genesee Country Village & Museum in Mumford, N.Y., the third-largest living museum in the United States, experience life as it was in New York State from the 1790s to 1900. From April 5 to 7, you can attend a magic-lantern show, write a poem with a celestial motif, and sample 19th-century eclipse-themed treats for $17. On the day of the eclipse, $250 will get you and a carload of friends into the viewing area; individual tickets start at $55.

Treat yourself

Add some aahs to your oohs with the Moon Shadow package at La Cantera Resort & Spa in San Antonio, which includes an opening-night reception, a complimentary bottle of bubbly and a viewing party, starting at $3,500 for a three-night stay for two. Or how about a 15-day cruise through the Panama Canal — with a chance to witness the eclipse at sea near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico? Interior rooms are still available for $1,199 on the Emerald Princess , departing from Los Angeles on April 5. Or perhaps you have always wanted to roll down the highway in a luxury R.V., which becomes an asset if the weather takes a turn for the worse and clearer skies lie just a few hours’ drive away. Spot2Nite.com offers packages starting at $625 a night that combine R.V. rentals with campground sites from Texas to Ohio.

Fly the darkened skies

The best thing about viewing an eclipse from an airplane? “You don’t have to worry about clouds because you’re high above them. And at 35,000 to 40,000 feet, you’re seeing the eclipse against a much clearer, transparent sky as opposed to being at ground level,” said Joseph Rao, an associate and guest lecturer at Hayden Planetarium and an avid eclipse chaser who has seen 13 totalities — five aboard an aircraft . Delta Air Lines has been advertising path-of-totality flights from Austin (sold out) and Dallas-Fort Worth to Detroit. Southwest Airlines (which is running a sweepstakes to win a seat) also offers scheduled flights along the path. The downsides of an air-clipse? “You’re experiencing the event in a sort of sterile environment,” Mr. Rao said. Also, the angle of the sun in the sky at the time of totality may not line up with the view from a typical airplane window, which could limit some passengers’ ability to see it unless the pilots bank or set a special course — as a few reportedly did during the 2017 total eclipse.

Know Before You Go

Mind the centerline: When picking the spot to view the eclipse, remember that the closer you are to the middle of the path, the longer the eclipse will last. As you plan your trip, consult an eclipse map for the prime spots.

Factor in traffic: In the United States, there are about 32 million people living along the eclipse’s path, and tons more will be heading toward it. Give yourself extra time.

Bring some cash: If you’re headed to a rural area, the hordes joining you there will most likely tax the infrastructure. If the internet goes down, your credit card will become just another piece of plastic, and your phone a shiny brick.

Have backup eye protection: Most festivals will be handing out free solar eclipse glasses, but if you lose them, you won’t be able to track the moon as it slides over the sun (during the brief few minutes of totality, you can safely look at it without protective eyewear , according to NASA). Check the American Astronomical Society’s list of trusted manufacturers and sellers, then place an order now. Like, right now.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

Voyager 1, the 46-year-old first craft in interstellar space which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth, may have gone dark .

Two spacecraft have ended up askew on the moon this year, illustrating that it’s not so easy to land upright on the lunar surface. Here is why .

What do you call a galaxy without stars? In addition to dark matter and dark energy, we now have dark galaxies  — collections of stars so sparse and faint that they are all but invisible.

Is Pluto a planet? And what is a planet, anyway? Test your knowledge here .

When is Ramadan 2024 and how is the moon sighted?

Following the sighting of the moon, Saudi Arabia has announced that the first day of fasting will be Monday, March 11.

Interactive_Ramadan_2024_When is Ramadan2_outside image

Following the  sighting  of the crescent by the moon-sighting committee, Saudi Arabia has announced that the first day of fasting will be Monday, March 11.

Ramadan is determined by the Islamic lunar calendar, which begins with the sighting of the crescent moon. Saudi Arabia and other Muslim-majority countries rely on the testimonies of moon sighters to determine the start of the month.

Keep reading

Algeria inaugurates world’s third-largest mosque ahead of ramadan, biden says agreement reached for ceasefire during ramadan, gaza ceasefire talks fail to make breakthrough with ramadan approaching, how is the ramadan moon sighted.

For the moon to be visible, the crescent must set after the sun. This allows the sky to be dark enough to spot the small slither of the new moon.

After the sun sets on the night of March 10, 29th of Shaaban month in the Hijri calendar, moon sighters face west with a clear view of the horizon for a first glimpse of the crescent moon.

In Saudi Arabia, testimonies of people who have spotted the moon are recorded and the Supreme Court makes a decision on when Ramadan should begin.

Interactive_Ramadan_2024_How is the moon sighted

The moon phases of Ramadan

Lunar months last between 29 and 30 days, depending on the sighting of the new moon on the 29th night of each month. If the new moon is not visible, the month lasts 30 days.

Interactive_Ramadan_2024_moon phases

Why is Ramadan holy?

Muslims believe that Ramadan is the month in which the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad more than 1,400 years ago.

Throughout the month, observing Muslims fast from just before the sunrise prayer, Fajr, to the sunset prayer, Maghrib.

The fast entails abstinence from eating, drinking, smoking, and sexual relations to achieve greater “taqwa”, or consciousness of God.

Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with the Muslim declaration of faith, daily prayers, charity, and performing the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca if physically and financially capable.

In many Muslim-majority countries, working hours are reduced, and most restaurants are closed during fasting hours

Interactive_Raamdan_2024_Quran revealed in Ramadan

How do you wish someone for Ramadan?

Various Muslim-majority nations have a personalised greeting in their native languages. “Ramadan Mubarak” and “Ramadan Kareem” are common greetings exchanged in this period, wishing the recipient a blessed and generous month, respectively.

Interactive_Ramadanan_2024_Different language revised_March 11

When is Eid al-Fitr?

At the end of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr. In Arabic, it means “festival of breaking the fast”.

Depending on the new moon sighting, Eid al-Fitr, which lasts three days, will likely start on April 10 or 11.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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A Rejected NASA Prototype Inspired Omega’s White Speedmaster Moonwatch

White Omega Speedmaster MoonWatch

Eagerly awaited by die-hard Omega fans since the watch was spotted on Daniel Craig’s wrist at a New York exhibition in November 2023, Omega has finally unveiled a new version of its famous Speedmaster Moonwatch chronograph. It is the first of the current generation with a white dial, a high-contrast alternative to the classic black aesthetic. Crucially, it also follows in the footsteps of some of Omega’s most experimental vintage Speedmasters.

The 42-mm, $8,100 (£7,600) hand-wound watch joins the core collection of Speedmaster Professional references, making it the first time Omega has offered a white dial option outside of now-discontinued limited editions. Powered by the METAS-certified Master Chronometer calibre 3861—Omega’s flagship manual-winding movement, offering up best-in-class magnetic resistance and a 50-hour power reserve—inside the new Speedmaster is mechanically unchanged, yet the simple change of dial color places it in a tradition of highly desirable rare Speedmasters.

The first Speedmaster debuted in 1957. It was first worn in space by Mercury 7 astronaut Walter Schirra in 1962, but the Speedmaster Moonwatch traces its lineage to 1965, when the watch was officially certified by NASA as “flight-qualified” for all manned space missions.

White Omega Speedmaster MoonWatch

Omega's new Moonwatch chrono dial color places it in a tradition of highly desirable rare Speedmasters.

But the history of white-dialed Speedmasters begins in 1969, as NASA engineer Jim Regan worked with Omega to prototype improvements to the watches worn into orbit and to the moon. The brief was for a more shock-proof and temperature-resistant watch for use on lunar expeditions and EVA (extravehicular activities), or spacewalks—temperatures could reach 120°C (248°F) in the direct glare of the sun.

Omega responded with a prototype known as the Alaska project (nothing to do with the state, it was simply Omega’s in-house codename for all NASA-commissioned watches). Cased in titanium—at the time a rare, exotic, and demanding material to work with—it boasted an additional shielding case of anodized aluminum in bright red. Inside, Omega upgraded the movement with various new components, more durable polymers, and lubricating oils specially chosen for their resistance to heat. The white dial was a purely functional choice, for its ability to reflect more heat.

Rejected by NASA as too expensive, the Alaska stood out for its white dial with checkered inner flange and large, triangular chronograph hands. These resembled the Apollo reentry capsule, but were designed with a purpose: It was supposed to make the watch easier to read under extreme vibration.

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The first titanium Project Alaska Omega watch had a shielding case of anodized aluminum in bright red.

Omega followed the first Alaska prototype with a second design the following year, cased in the conventional 42-mm Moonwatch case. It retained the oversize red aluminum outer case and white dial, while on this model the steel cases were bead-blasted rather than polished to reduce dazzling reflections. The “capsule” hands also remained, but in black, and the classic Speedmaster’s tachymeter bezel (most useful for tracking speed over a known distance; relatively impossible in space) was replaced by a 60-minute scale.

Despite its more conventional styling and cheaper production costs, NASA decided not to order the watch, preferring to stick with what it knew. The Alaska Project watches did eventually make it into space, however, worn by Soyuz 25 mission cosmonauts between 1977 and 1981.

A white dial would not grace another Speedmaster Moonwatch until 1997, when a commemorative limited edition was produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the Speedmaster, and it was only sold in Italy.

In 2008, a limited-edition Alaska Project homage was released, and others have since followed, including the Silver Snoopy of 2015. In 2021, a white-dial Speedy was released in Omega’s proprietary Canopus white gold.

But this new model in stainless steel (reference 310.30.42.50.04.001) is the most attainable white version so far. Today, Omega says the color scheme is a nod to astronauts’ space suits, which it may be—but for fans of the brand it will always relate back to those Cold War creations.

So important were the Alaska Project watches, they were also immortalized in MoonSwatch form in 2022, as the red-bioceramic-cased Mission to Mars.

There are a number of other touches that cement this new Speedmaster’s place as the spiritual successor to the Alaska Project watches: The red Speedmaster dial text is a subtle nod to the design of both Alaska models; and the glossy lacquer used for the dial (another small first for Omega-kind) is in its own way harking back to the highly reflective capabilities of those top-secret prototypes.

Equipped with a sapphire crystal, water-resistant to 50 meters, and machined to tolerances that engineers of the 1960s could only dream of, this is a thoroughly modern Speedmaster—but like all the best Speedmasters, it has a powerful connection to the past.

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The next total solar eclipse is in April and people already have travel plans

After april 8, the next cosmic super show in the continental 48 won’t be until 2045, and then only areas of the dakotas and montana will experience daytime darkness..

moon travel story

Next month, Rick Kupfer will travel to Texas Hill Country for the first time. He’ll set up some lawn chairs about an hour northwest of Austin near a place where the Buchanan Dam holds back the Colorado River and where for more than four minutes on April 8 the afternoon sun will turn coal black .

It’s the second trip for the Boynton Beach resident into the shadow of a total solar eclipse after a 2017 experience near Casper, Wyoming where the daytime twinkle of stars and pearly corona behind Earth’s only natural satellite were on display for two and a half minutes.  

“It looks like there is a big hole in the sky, like a big black hole in the sky,” Kupfer said. “We are so lucky that this is happening in our lifetime. It’s so rare, it’s exhilarating.”

Before 2017, the last total solar eclipse to be seen by a portion of the United States was a cloud-plagued event in 1979. After April 8, the next cosmic super show in the continental 48 won’t be until 2045, and then only areas of the Dakotas and Montana will experience daytime darkness.

Reserving a spot to watch solar eclipse a tricky business, and expensive one

In Palm Beach County, which is more than 1,000 miles from the eastern edge of the April 8th path of totality, about 50% of the sun will be covered by the moon.

That’s why for so-called “shadow chasers,” plans to reach next month’s 115-mile-wide path of totality from the sandy beaches of Mazatlan through the valleys of Newfoundland have been months, even years, in the making.

Where were you?: Pilgrims flock to path of totality for Great American Eclipse of 2017

Kupfer, 71, said he made reservations nearly a year in advance at a short-term rental in Austin, only to have the owner cancel several months ago because, he believes, they realized they could charge more for a stay during the eclipse. Kupfer booked a second rental for a “very good price,” then was canceled again.

“The one we’re in now is priced more toward what it should probably be for the eclipse,” Kupfer said.

The area in the Texas Hill Country where Kupfer and his wife are headed was strategically chosen. It will experience four minutes and 25 seconds of totality and has low chances of rain and clouds in early April, according to Astronomy.com.

Meteorologist Orlando Bermudez with the National Weather Service in New Braunfels, Texas, said many people are traveling west of Austin to Kerrville where NASA is hosting an eclipse festival on April 8. Although rainy season begins in April, Bermudez said it doesn’t ramp up until May, and while prevailing southerly winds can increase morning clouds in spring, they usually clear by afternoon.

The website Eclipsophile.com considered this year’s El Niño in making weather predictions for April 8, looking at satellite measurements of cloud cover and focusing on Aprils that follow an El Niño winter.

It found Texas was the most likely to benefit from the current El Niño with clearer April skies than other areas in the eclipse path.

“It would be a real bummer to get clouded out,” Kupfer said.  

Then something amazing happened: “Dear God, go away!” someone yelled at the cloud covering the eclipse

Kerrville is where Boynton Beach resident and retired astronomy professor Sam Storch, 75, is headed with a group of fellow shadow chasers. In 2017, he went to Driggs, Idaho, west of Grand Teton National Park, to watch the eclipse, which was the first in 100 years to cross the entire country.

“I can think of only one other experience that was personally as intense as seeing totality and that would be actually seeing my first child literally emerge from the womb and be placed in my arms,” Storch said. “That was the only thing as intense as totality.”

North of Austin in Bell County, Texas, officials issued a state of emergency in February to prepare for a crush of eclipse seekers that could double the county’s population of 400,000. The issuance, in part, requires landowners who plan to lease space or host parties of 50 or more people to register the event with the county and provide site plans and designate routes for emergency vehicles.

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Florida's closest recent recorded brush with a full solar eclipse occurred in 1970 when North Florida fell within the moon's shadow.

Next month, Pensacola will see about 76% of the sun covered by the moon.

The coverage decreases the farther south you go so that West Palm Beach will see about half of the sun covered beginning at 1:48 p.m. Maximum coverage will occur at 3:03 p.m.

Several South Florida observatories will be open for the eclipse, including the Marmot Observatory at the Cox Science Center and Aquarium in West Palm Beach, Florida Atlantic University’s observatory in Boca Raton and the Fox Astronomical Observatory in Sunrise.

Save your eyes: Take precautions when watching solar eclipse

There will be a limited amount of solar eclipse glasses available at each event. It is important never to look at the sun during an eclipse without appropriate eye protection except during the few moments of totality when the moon completely blocks the sun's face. Normal sunglasses — even those with the darkest lenses — aren’t enough to protect your eyes from damaging rays.

It’s not that the sun is any stronger during an eclipse, but where you would squint, blink and turn away from the full sun, it can be more comfortable to look at the sun as the moon moves over the bright disk.

The next total solar eclipse that crosses the entire continental United States is Aug. 12, 2045. Its path will go from Northern California through Florida with most of the Sunshine State in the path of totality.

“Nowhere else in our solar system has anything like this,” said FAU astronomer Eric Vandernoot, noting the unique sun, moon and Earth configuration that allows for a total solar eclipse. “We have so much perfection set up for us.”

Kimberly Miller is a veteran journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate and how growth affects South Florida's environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to [email protected].   Help support our local journalism: Subscribe today.

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  1. Lunar tales: The first (imaginative) Moon landings

    The earliest known written story about people traveling to the Moon was by Lucian of Samosata, a Syrian-Greek writer born around 125 AD. His travels throughout the Mediterranean world were the ...

  2. Three medieval tales about adventures to the Moon from around the world

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  3. History of Lunar Exploration

    The story of the Moon's history and processes is interesting in its own right, but it has also subtly shifted perspectives on our own origins. One of the most significant discoveries of the 1980s was the giant impact 65 million years ago in Mexico that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, allowing the subsequent rise of mammals.

  4. A Reading List of Stories About the Moon

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  5. Lunar Tales: The First (Imaginative) Moon Landings

    Since at least 125 A.D., humans have been telling stories about visiting the Moon. This iconic shot from the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon shows the fabled Man in the Moon embedded with a massive, bullet-like spacecraft that was launched from Earth by a giant cannon. (Credit: drmvm1/Flickr) It's been 50 years since humans first landed on the Moon.

  6. Ten of the best: Journeys to the Moon

    A True Story, by Lucian In the second century AD the Greek satirist used a journey to the Moon to mock human preoccupations.We meet "moonmen" with "artificial penises, generally of ivory but, in ...

  7. A brief history of moon exploration

    In the 1950s, the Cold War sparked a race to visit Earth's moon with flybys, robots, and crewed missions. Here's what we discovered—and what's next. For as long as humans have gazed skyward, the moon has been a focus of fascination. We could always see our cosmic partner's mottled, cratered face by eye.

  8. Neil Armstrong

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  9. Journeys to the Moon in Ancient Greece

    It is perhaps for this reason—its plausible placeness—that the moon has been the subject of stories about space travel for much longer. The earliest surviving Greco-Roman text about travel to the moon was written in the second century BC. It is Antonius Diogenes' The Incredible Things Beyond Thule, a complex faux-memoir by an unnamed ...

  10. Artemis I Travel Essentials: The Ultimate Personal Tour Guide ...

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  11. Destination Moon: The 350-Year History of Lunar Exploration

    Early moon-voyage stories usually featured balloons, birds or dreams as the mode of travel. French novelist Jules Verne's 1865 novel "From the Earth to the Moon" imagines travelers shot around ...

  12. World tales of the Moon

    Boy on the Moon. Origin: North America. Learn More. Original music by Louise Goldberg. Original sound engineering by Steve Bellett. Stories are taken from the Wonder-Full Moon DVD, developed by the awesome US Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville AL. Check out The Vanishing Sun: Eclipse Tales from Around the World.

  13. The Moon Landing

    Before touching down, the three men split up. Collins boarded Apollo 11's command module, the Columbia, where he would remain in orbit around the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin boarded Apollo 11's lunar module, the Eagle, and began to descend to the moon's surface.. The Eagle made a risky landing in a shallow moon crater named the Sea of Tranquility. . (Most people watching the landing on TV ...

  14. Moon in science fiction

    The 1938 short story "Magician of Dream Valley" by Raymond Z. Gallun portrays energy-based life on the Moon, as does the 1960 short story "The Trouble with Tycho" by Clifford D. Simak. The titular mission of the 2011 film Apollo 18 is a secret project to investigate alien life in the form of lunar rocks. Moon landings

  15. NASA announces 4 astronauts who will travel around the moon on Artemis

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  16. Moon Stories

    NASA's LRO Spots Japan's Moon Lander. On Jan. 19, 2024, at 10:20 a.m. EST, the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on the lunar surface. Five days later, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft passed over the landing site and….

  17. Moon exploration, facts and information

    In the 1950s, the Cold War sparked a race to visit Earth's moon with flybys, robots, and crewed missions. ... Each mission after Apollo 11 set new milestones in space travel and lunar exploration.

  18. Apollo 11 Moon landing: Everything you need to know

    The mission blasted off on 16 July 1969. It took four days, six hours and 45 minutes to get to the Moon. The lunar module landed on the Moon at 8:17pm on 20 July 1969. By the time the crew landed ...

  19. All About the Moon

    On July 20, 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to set foot on the dusty surface of the Moon. Ten other American astronauts followed. They collected hundreds of pounds of lunar soil and rock samples, conducted experiments and installed equipment for follow-up measurements.

  20. NASA is set to return to the moon. Here are 4 reasons to go back

    Space. NASA is set to return to the moon. Here are 4 reasons to go back. Astronaut Charlie M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, is photographed collecting lunar ...

  21. To the moon and beyond: what 2022 holds for space travel

    If February's mission succeeds, a crewed trip around the moon will take place in 2024 and this will be followed by a lunar landing in 2025 - a gap of 53 years since Apollo 17, the last crewed ...

  22. Moon Guides

    by Moon Travel Guides. Get inspired and get ready for adventure with the ultimate guide to Europe's best trips! From Amsterdam to Zurich, this one-of-a-kind guidebook reveals Europe's best cities, road trips, rail excursions, outdoor adventures, and more. Start building your Europe bucket list today. $27.99.

  23. Japan moon lander put to sleep after surviving lunar night

    Japan's moon lander has been put back to sleep after it surprisingly survived the freezing, two-week lunar night, the country's space agency said, with another operation attempt scheduled for ...

  24. Time Travel: Observing Cosmic History

    Light Travel The answer is simply light. The term "light-year" shows up a lot in astronomy. This is a measure of distance that means exactly what it says - the distance that light travels in one year. Given that the speed of light is 186,000 miles (299,000 kilometers) per second, light can cover some serious […]

  25. Here comes the new moon in Pisces

    The dark side of the moon is on the rise, folks. On March 10, 2024, the new moon in the sweet cereal milk of Pisces peaks at 4:59 AM EST, hours after we spring forward into Daylight Savings Time.

  26. Total Solar Eclipse of 2024: 31 Things to Do

    On April 8, the moon will blot out the sun along a roughly 4,200-mile-long, 115-mile-wide path across North America. ... If its more-than-$8,000 price tag is a little too rich, you can travel to ...

  27. When is Ramadan 2024 and how is the moon sighted?

    The moon phases of Ramadan. Lunar months last between 29 and 30 days, depending on the sighting of the new moon on the 29th night of each month. If the new moon is not visible, the month lasts 30 ...

  28. What to expect during April's total solar eclipse

    The event will be visible to millions — including 32 million people in the US alone — who live along the route the moon's shadow will travel during the eclipse, known as the path of totality ...

  29. Omega 2024 White Speedmaster Moonwatch: Specs, Price, Availability

    The 42-mm, $8,100 (£7,600) hand-wound watch joins the core collection of Speedmaster Professional references, making it the first time Omega has offered a white dial option outside of now ...

  30. The next total solar eclipse is in April and people already have travel

    It's so rare, it's exhilarating.". Before 2017, the last total solar eclipse to be seen by a portion of the United States was a cloud-plagued event in 1979. After April 8, the next cosmic ...