New Promotional Video

Paint Your Ad Message on the Moon with Shadows

This video by MoonPublicity.com shows a concept for displaying advertising messages on the Moon's surface with the imprints created by a rover with special wheels using the patented Shadow Shaping Technology.



The MoonPublicity.com business model is best summarised by this paragraph on one of the pages of their website:

"Let’s suppose it would cost a billion dollars to create and send a fleet of Shadow Shaping robots to the moon, the project would pay for itself in less than 3 years after completion. Over the next 50 years it would generate 18 billion dollars worth of advertising. And since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, the image could last for thousands of years."

I'm not sure how they will deal with all the craters, not to mention the lunar conservationists!

See also the interesting comments on the Gizmodo article about this project.

Apollo 11 - 40 years ago today - man's first step on the Moon

Today it was 40 years ago that Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon. This event changed not only the face of history but also what man believed was possible to achieve.

In honour of this day here's a video of the actual event.

Apollo 11 Lander Photograph from Lunar Orbit

A lonely shadow cast across the barren surface of the Moon is evidence of humanity's greatest space adventure. This photo taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) (currently orbiting the Moon) shows the Apollo 11 landing site, "Tranquility Base".


The Apollo 11 lander descent stage is the bright spot with angular features at the left end of the elongated shadow. This man-made creation was left on the Moon when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin departed in the Apollo 11 ascent stage on the 21st of July 1969 after spending 21.6 hours on the surface.

The large crater to the right of the lander is also clearly identifiable in an image taken on the Moon's surface by Armstrong (below).


More images including other the Apollo landing sites are available at NASA's LRO Page.

Kim Jong Il Announces Plan To Bring Moon To North Korea - ONN

The Onion News Network are at it again, this time with a controversial report on Kim Jong Il's plan to bring the Moon to North Korea. If he was to succeed this would of course make nonsense out of Nasa's Lunar program & the Google Lunar X-PRIZE :)



The mission is to be completed by 2015, using 5 rockets to drag the moon back to earth. For the sake of humanity, let's hope this plan does not succeed :)

The Moon's in a Hurry

"The moon in a hurry" by Nautilus 1, on Flickr

Underwater Training for Lunar Exploration

Can the oceans and lake's of planet Earth be useful environments for practicing future lunar exploration?

According to this article in SpaceRef.com they can..

NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt believes that more scientific value can be obtained by mission planning allows astronauts more flexibility to investigate interesting discoveries, and he is using his extensive diving experience to try and prove it.

Well, it's not clear if Earth-bound mission planners will give more autonomy to lunar astronauts, but one's things for sure, it's much easier to test operational concepts at underwater sites rather than in space.

(Featured picure insert: ANZ-100 submersible from sub-find.com)

Mythbusters: We Went to the Moon, Get Over It!

As previously announced, last Wednesday the Discovery channel Mythbusters team tackled the myth that NASA never landed on the Moon.

Several myths were busted during the show such as:

• Non-parallel shadows: Due to the lunar terrain (Reproduced using mockups)
• Flying flag: Due to the inertia applied by the astronauts (Reproduced in a vacuum chamber)
• Boot traces: Due to the nature of the lunar soil (Tested with lunar soil simulant and a vacuum chamber)
• Walking style on the Moon: Reproduced on a zero-g plane

As a last nail in the skeptics coffins, the team visited to a large telescope and shot a laser at the Apollo 15 landing site. They received the reflected signal which can only prove the presenence of the optical reflector deployed by the astronauts at the landing site.

If you are interested by more busted lunar myths, take a look at the Mythbusters website and have a look to the extra myths that could not be shown due to time constraint.

Well, what does this leave for Google Lunar X PRIZE teams going after the Heritage Bonus Prize? Mythbusters proved that the physical effects shown on the Moon were realistic, and debunked the skeptics claims that those effects were proof of a fraud. However they still did not prove that the Apollo astronauts landed, rather they disproved the supposed 'evidence' of fraud. High definition video and photos of an Apollo landing site, perhaps showing evidence of the 40 or so years of exposure to the space environment, would certainly add more to the case!

Buy your moon rocks here

Now just $7500 you can buy a gram of lunar regolith, returned from the Moon by Interorbital System... and you can do it all over the internet. See this page on the Interorbital site.

Now, it's certainly a good idea, but how are they going to do it? While the Soveit Union completed three lunar sample return missions back in the early seventies as part of the Luna Programme, one must agree that it is extremely difficult.

To collect samples on the Moon, launch a rocket back to Earth, re-enter the atmosphere and survive the landing. Even the Google Lunar X PRIZE mission to land on the Moon and drive a rover around is already far more challengining than anything achieved by privately funded space companies.

Good luck Interorbital but we suggest you don't offer a service guarantee ;)

Journey to the center of the Earth ... and beyond!

Cave explorer Bill Stone talks about his journeys to the center of the earth, sending an autonomous robot to Jupiter’s moon Europa, and his plans of digging for lunar ice on the moon.