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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt's vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like "real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy." More »
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China continues to make headway in its efforts to become one of the world's foremost spacefaring nations. In a white paper issued last week, the Chinese government officially announced its intentions to place a manned spacecraft on the moon. More »
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Although the ashes of Gene Roddenberry, Timothy Leary, and James Doohan are currently in orbit around the Earth, the remains of only one person, planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker, have ever been sent to the moon. Now the company that helped put him there, Celestis, is opening up lunar burial to the public. So, even if you never get to visit the moon in life, you can make it your final resting place. More »
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India has officially landed on the moon. Today, the Indian Space Research Organisation advanced its first deep space mission, Chandrayaan-1, by releasing its Moon Impact Probe, which successfully crash landed near the moon’s south pole and opened an exciting new chapter in Asia’s space exploration. More »
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All of the off-world buzz these days may be around Mars and Titan, but NASA contractors are looking to send human life a little closer to home. Project Constellation, NASA’a agenda for the future of spaceflight, outlines plans for the construction of a lunar outpost starting in 2019. But with no water and no atmosphere, even limited colonization of the moon promises to be a challenging and expensive endeavor. So engineers are turning to a substance that may make moon-based life easier: lunar dirt. More »
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NASA is readying two spacecraft to slam into the Moon's South Pole in an effort to find hidden polar ice a year from now, which gives Hollywood plenty of time to prep the movie and release it when all of this Moon-violence is at a fever pitch. After the spacecraft crash dead-on into the moon, another standby ship will fly through the plume that gets thrown up, grab some of the debris, and then analyze it. But what if this were a major motion picture? Things would turn out a little differently. Here's our idea. More »
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Artist James Clyne, who already wowed us with what turned out to be a racer lost in Antarctica, also has a gorgeous vision of what it would be like if we started modifying and hacking the moon into a place to live and do business. But what's up with that giant ball in the middle of downtown? City-to-city low-gravity volleyball? Find out the answer, along with details of http://www.jamesclyne.com/artist's vision, after the jump. More »
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Photos like this one prove that you don't need a fancy telescope to take incredible moon pictures that vividly reveal lunar geography. ComputerHotline took this much-admired picture using a Nikon Coolpix P5000 in afocal behind binoculars (12*40), without a color filter. More »
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