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.