The partial eclipse of the Moon from lunar orbit

The view from low lunar orbit. The partial eclipse of the Moon June 4, 2012 may not have seemed very dramatic, for those living along the Pacific Rim fortunate enough to see it, but this line up of nodes and crossings became a solar eclipse when viewed from the Moon using Martin Schweiger's priceless Orbiter Simulator (2010 P1) program. On the left Venus closes in for it's June 5 transit. The angle above was weaved from a perspective 70 kilometers over the Moon's western limb timed at 0946 UT, June 4, 2012 [Orbiter 2010 P1/Martin Schweiger].

Sequential HDTV stills capture a total eclipse of the Sun (a dramatic 2009 total eclipse of the Moon for those of us still on Earth), from Japan's lunar orbiter SELENE-1 (Kaguya) [JAXA/NHK/SELENE].

New Gemini: Re-Thinking Heavy-Lift

Notional orbital propellant depots - As millions who have flown to the Moon (without leaving their PC) using the popular DeltaGliderIV add-on to Martin Schweiger's acclaimed and free Orbital Simulator program know, it is "possible" to get there without using a heavy-lift booster. It is "just" possible, that is, though it does take practice and some knowledge of Von Braun's free-return trajectory.

Pulling this stunt off, in real time, for me at least, also requires an off-plain orbit change and subsequent rendezvous and docking with the magically restored Soviet Mir space station, conveniently parked in low-earth orbit, as near as possible to the orbital plain of the Moon.

With a replenished "fuel" tank, using the DeltaGliderIV, a pilot can then line up for trans-lunar injection, just like the Apollo-Saturn IVB configurations of yore, and arrive with a reasonable amount of crew and cargo for the low-energy (~800 m/s) orbital insertion burn behind the Moon, in 90 to 120 hours, again, just like Apollo. It is also possible to land at a precise location on the Moon, breaking orbit for a terminal insertion burn, make a pin-point landing and then return to lunar orbit and afterward accelerate for a two to three day return to Earth, just like Apollo.

Unlike Apollo, I have not succeeded in a direct re-entry at 25,000 mph. Either the vehicle or the pilot can't handle such a hairy maneuver, yet. Instead, I have successfully used what remained of the "vehicle's" fuel to reduce velocity while speeding up through what would otherwise be a hopeless Earth fly-by, from over 11,000 meters per second to the 7700 meters-plus per second velocity of low-earth orbit. I have then subsequently performed the tricky Shuttle-like "standard" re-entry maneuver and dead-weight runway landing.

If Orbital Simulator 2006 can be thought of as Martin Schweiger's "chalk board," a vehicle small enough to fit inside the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle can travel to the Moon, land and return to Earth. Without on-orbit fuel transfer, however, involving a rendezvous with a pre-fueled payload assist (PAM) rocket or a direct fuel transfer, the scenario described definitely requires an expensive, heavy-lift expendable booster.

Admittedly, on-orbit refueling after using more than half of a small vehicle's fuel capacity (to say the least) is science fiction, but no more than orbital rendezvous was equally problematic before the Gemini program (1965-1966). Unlike orbital rendezvous, which the United States, Russia and more recently the ESA have made appear easy, on-orbit refueling would not be a magic act. It requires more than a little appreciation for the delicacies and sensitivities of temperatures and couplings.

Or does it? The Constellation program, in a very real way, already features on-orbit refueling, using the rendezvous and docking with pre-positioned unmanned vehicles launched using unmanned heavy-lift boosters, like the Ariane V, or the Ares V now under development.

Long term, for manned space travel beyond low-Earth orbit to be less than prohibitively expensive, according the Second Augustine commission, may require a step beyond the Apollo-Saturn and Shuttle surplus idea to new, "perhaps" cheaper technologies. These won't be free R&D spin-offs, but the result of a deliberate program, probably as expensive as Gemini, to take orbital rendezvous past a dangerous, though logical, technological hurdle.

From Popular Mechanics and Rand Simberg

"It has long been conventional wisdom, going all the way back to Apollo, that heavy lift was a prerequisite for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, but this summer has seen several cracks start to appear in that consensus. First, partly as a result of white papers circulated among its members in the last few weeks, the Augustine panel itself has championed the concept of propellant depots. But defenders of the current approach have claimed that the ideas aren't fleshed out, and are too complex and expensive. This week, at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics annual meeting on space in Pasadena, Calif., several technical papers have more to say on the subject of getting back to the moon with existing launch systems.

"While Boeing and Lockheed Martin can smell the Ares blood in the water, they still both have lucrative contracts for the Constellation program (Orion for Lockheed Martin, and the Ares I upper stage for Boeing), and they can't afford to upset the apple cart unless they know that the program is definitely dead. Three years ago, Lockheed Martin got itself into hot water with the former administrator, Mike Griffin, at the AIAA meeting in San Jose, where they held a joint press conference with Bigelow Aerospace announcing a study to "human rate" the Atlas V to service Bigelow's planned facilities. Griffin reportedly called upper management there to complain about the potential threat these plans posed to maintaining political support for Ares."

Read the full article HERE.

Lunar Scenario for Flight Simulator 2004

Just after having tried, and failed, to start a serious discussion about simulation environments for would-be and arm-chair "Citizen Scientists," among serious competitors for a place in NASA's "new era of lunar exploration, TerraBuilder of Ontario announces a rudimentary Lunar Scenario for Microsoft's popular Flight Simulator platform.

Although I will most definitely purchase and download the program, if only to award TerraBuilder's thoughtfulness, I immediately found myself saying, "gee, I really could have used this, three years ago."

TerraBuilder's "LRV for TerraBuilder: Moon" is a long-overdue and essential sim for the hundreds of thousands of lunatics like me that, unfortunately, also comes with two heartbreaking drawbacks.

The mare, highland, rilles and mountain scenes are very welcome, don't get me wrong. Unfortunately, the hard-core Flight Simulator addicts long ago upgraded to Flight Simulator X, and this add-on is designed for Flight Simulator 2004.

Fortunately, however, for me, that's not a problem.

While others (like my great and good friend "Waccobird," in Florida) were spending hours perfecting Rocketplane instrument ratings on FSX, doing carrier landings with the skill of Alan Shepherd, I just never bothered to upgrade to FSX. Indeed, I never bothered to load even FS'04 on my seriously upgraded machine. In fact, this machine was seriously pumped primarily to fully experience Dr. Martin Schweiger's Orbiter Simulator 2006 (P2), which stole my heart away from Flight Simulator four years ago.

For nearly a decade, this Senior Fellow at London's University College London has quietly upgraded and then released, for free, to hundreds of thousands of his hungry followers what is probably the best Open Source and real time spaceflight simulator available to the public.

Being a serious lunatic, I've been disappointed with his Clementine based lunar albedo maps, but not with OrbiterSim's astonishingly grand orbital dynamics, and not for its Open Source and eager add-on developer community that's made possible for me countless rendezvous and dockings with ISS, at least eight dozen flights to the Moon and back, mastering re-entry and learning what one can and cannot do starting from a dead stop from the surface of Earth.

I've built a thousand scenarios, including the retrieval of Vanguard from it's more than 50 year- old perch, passing through the Van Allen Belts every 100 minutes since 1958.

With no apparent need of fanfare, Dr. Schweiger has done more to recreate the "feel" of real-time space travel for the lucky few who have taken the brief time necessary to learn, than NASA.

It's the reason I bought the Gateway HD display, the Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and why I partitioned my hard drives to run both Vista and XP.

The other drawback to TerraBuilder: Moon, is that the realistically diverse lunar scenery (which I fully expect to be included in Dr. Schweiger's next Orbiter Sim, hopefully soon, perhaps after Kaguya completes it's laser altimeter model) does not include actual features. At least when I land near the Apollo landing sites, or Reiner Gamma, the landscape, essentially a large photograph, is actually brighter.

Accomplishing a lunar landing using OrbiterSim just isn't as rewarding when the scenery is Clementine-correct albedo and color is also flat as a piece of paper. But, the combination of TerraBuilder: Moon and the otherwise exceptional and essential Orbiter Simulator, is at least a step in the right direction.

And so, if only for the well-done detail of its Apollo Lunar Rover, for the concept vehicles, and details and promise of more to come, I will dust off my metal can filled with Flight Simulator 2004 disks and finally bother to load it on this new system that has long outgrown it; to reward myself for another successfull navigation of the DeltaGliderIV from the Global TransPark in North Carolina, to refueling in LEO, through TLI, to LLO, to Terminal Descent and another satisfyingly precise 2 mps touchdown where Descartes C crater is supposed to be, to experience the look of a real moon on my HD display.

I want to reward TerraBuilder for, if belatedly, remembering the simulation of space travel is as close as some of us will ever get to walking and riding on Earth's Moon. They only have to work on the longitude and latitude and existing topography. The lame excuse that they are awaiting more details from LRO and Kaguya just doesn't fly. I want to land in Taurus-Littrow and see the South Massif, Tortilla Flats, and see the broad Cayley plain Charlie Duke and John Young could see from the Cinco craters up on Stone Mountain, and even measure that local magnetic anomaly while wondering over the expanse of South Ray Crater spread out below.

We have the technology.