Trollheart

Not quite sure what you mean there. The title was shown in the previous post, and then it was just a continuation of that, broken up by Mindfulness's smiley. I'm not sure how it could have been hard to have followed the progression? It's basically one post, but split up because of the restriction on the amount of characters. Exactly like my posts about the Sun. And how the next ones will be, too. I can only fit so much in, and surely I don't need to re-title every separate post on the same subject as it follows?

"Previously, on Mercury..."

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

III: A Woman Scorned: Venus in Heat

In recent times - or at least, I’ve only heard it recently - our nearest neighbour has been referred to as “Earth’s evil twin”. This is because Venus exhibits many of the main characteristics of our home planet, and in some ways, is almost a future vision of it, or what Earth may become if we don’t get up off our arses and do something about global warming. You see, Venus is kind of the poster child, or indeed cautionary tale for climate change, having already undergone the effect of the release of greenhouse gases across the planet, thus making it uninhabitable, if it ever was so, and all but a vision of Hell, right on our own doorstep. Just shows how wildly inaccurate ancient astronomers were when they saw it in the heavens and decided to lavish upon it the name of the goddess of love.

Setting aside the surface similarities between our planet and Venus, there are marked differences and none of them are good, not for us and not for the planet. It is the hottest planet in the solar system, bar none (and this surprises me because before we began our little expedition I always assumed that to be Mercury) with temperatures reaching 464 degrees Centigrade, has an atmosphere almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide and features gentle, relaxing clouds of… sulphuric acid, lending a new meaning to the term acid rain! Atmospheric pressure on the surface is 92 times that of Earth’s at sea level, or to put it another way, if you want to know what a brisk stroll on Venus would be like, dive into the ocean and descend to about 900m (that’s 3,000 feet, and also the last time I’m calculating another measurement scale) and you’ll get the idea.

As I indicated a few paragraphs ago, Venus has fallen victim to the runaway greenhouse effect. And no, that doesn’t describe a thief legging it with your prize cucumbers. When the greenhouse gases on a planet’s surface (we’re all familiar with/fed up hearing about those) rise and block thermal radiation from leaving the planet, no water can form and any water vapour there is will be likely to escape through the stratosphere and out into space. Essentially, the planet can’t cool down, and so it becomes a burning desert of a planet, dry and arid and exceptionally hot. The main greenhouse gases are water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. These gases are essential to life, but must be released into the air and dissipated. When this does not happen, as I say above, a runaway greenhouse effect results and you get a planet like Venus.

Venus is also the only other planet in the solar system not to have a single moon. In fact, in a weird coincidence, probably, the number of moons per planet increases as you move out into the solar system, with Mercury and Venus having none, Earth having one, Mars two and then of course the gas giants have them in the tens, Saturn having over eighty of them.

As if all the above though is not enough to classify Venus as a hell-planet, the atmosphere contains sulphur, and there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity on its surface. Let’s just say we won’t be landing there on our trip. I don’t think our insurance would cover it. What do you mean, you thought I was arranging it? Well now that's just... tell you what, say nothing to the others. I don't fancy taking an unscheduled space walk, do you? Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. No need to worry about insurance, everything is fine. So Venus has no moons. Right. Nevertheless, it is the brightest object in the sky, and you’ve no doubt seen it, even if you haven’t realised or cared what it was, on a clear night.

Most of the surface of the planet is covered by smooth volcanic plains, the rest composed of two highland plains, one of which, Ishtar Terra, boasts an eleven-kilometre high mountain (that’s like eleven Everests stacked one on top of the other) and unlike Mercury the surface of Venus features few craters, and is relatively smooth. This means the planet is quite young, a mere babe in arms actually, no more than 600 millions years old (ahhh!) and possibly even as young as 300. Coochy-coo! Ahem. There are features called farra, which are mostly flat, pancake-like depressions, arachnoids, which are not, as you might fear, robot killer spiders that patrol the surface, but rather radial or concentric fractures which look like spiders’ webs, coronae, circular rings of fractures which are often surrounded by a depression, and have nothing to do with the sun, and novae, radial, starlike fractures. All of these stem from volcanic activity.

Like its little brother, Mercury, the possibility for life seems to exist on Venus, although the detection of phosphine - a gas which scientists believed was impossible to create in Venus’s chemical atmosphere, and could only have come from living organisms - in the clouds above the planet have actually given rise to speculation that life currently exists there, albeit, again, no life we would recognise. No Venusian war wizards, for instance, or nubile princesses living in sky cities. Sorry, Mr. Burroughs! Mind you, Carl Sagan had been saying this since the sixties: While the surface conditions of Venus make the hypothesis of life there implausible, the clouds of Venus are a different story altogether. As was pointed out some years ago, water, carbon dioxide and sunlight—the prerequisites for photosynthesis—are plentiful in the vicinity of the clouds

(“Life in the Clouds of Venus?” - Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz, Nature Magazine, September 16 1967)

Still, this hypothesis seems to have been discounted after October 2020, when a re-examination of the clouds seemed to show no signs of phosphine, and the belief is that - without going into scientific terms which I neither understand nor care about - somebody fucked up and detected something that was not there. Well, I suppose at least the Venusians won’t be coming over here, taking our jobs, stealing our women...

The winds on Venus are very sluggish, but powerful nonetheless, mostly due to the very high density of the planet’s atmosphere, and the dispersal by the winds of dust and small stones across the surface. It’s pretty much the same wherever you go on the planet, or when, as neither seasonal changes nor geographic location varies across Venus, its axial tilt, while still a lot more pronounced than that of Mercury (but then, so is that of any other planet in the system) is a mere three percent and therefore doesn’t permit much in the way of change. In fact, if you want to cool down you’re best scaling that 11 km-high mountain, Maxwell Montes, where you’ll be able to bask in the refreshing temperature of a nice cooling 350 degrees C. Lovely! Yeah, that’s as cool as it gets on this planet. Oh, and that stuff that looks like snow on the peaks? Take my word for it, it’s not.

Despite the slow winds on the surface, if you were to somehow attempt to fly on Venus you would find it a whole different matter, as the winds up in the clouds rush around at about 300 kph every four or five days. That’s way faster and stronger than our Storm Force 10 winds on Earth, or the kind of winds that accompany the likes of hurricanes, which rarely reach over 120 kph. Venus has no seasons, no real weather, certainly no rain, ice or snow, though there is some speculation that it gets lightning storms. This however has not been proven, and there is plenty of doubt as to whether this could be possible in the dense atmosphere of the planet.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Venus differs from all other planets in the solar system by rotating clockwise, and very slowly, making its days longer than its years. A Venusian day is 243 Earth days while a Venusian year is only 225. Because of its atypical rotation, were it possible for it to be seen through the thick clouds of sulphur, the sun would be seen to rise in the west and set in the east on Venus. Although the planet has no moons, it’s theorised it may have had once, but either the lack of solar tides destabilised it/them and made it/them crash into Venus, or a large impact event, thought to have taken place millions of years after the planet had formed, may have resulted in the same outcome. Venus does however have small satellite asteroids, called trojans, which orbit it. Sure they do Trojan work, they do! Sorry.

Transits of Venus are not tough rugged white vans that haul cargo between here and there, but times at which the planet passes between the sun and Earth, and therefore becomes visible against the surface of the sun as a black spot. These transits usually take hours to complete, are often visible to the naked eye, and occur very infrequently, normally with about a century between one and the next. They occur in pairs, usually eight years apart. They can be likened to eclipses, and in addition to providing a pretty spectacular sight, help scientists to work out all sorts of things, including, recently, the existence of exo-planets (planets outside of our solar system) and prior to that, the size of the astronomical unit (AU).

As one of the brightest objects in the sky, Venus can be, and has been, observed in daylight. I believe I may have seen it myself. The ancient Greeks believed it was two planets, as Venus vanishes behind the sun for several days and then reappears: they called it Phosporos, the bringer of light, when they could see it in the morning, and Hesperus, the star of the evening, when they saw it at night. Later these two words became Lucifer, light bearer, the morning star.

Venus was in fact the first planet humans ever visited, albeit not personally, and a glut of space probes headed there during the late twentieth century. However, because it is impossible to land there, and the planet couldn’t be colonised or terraformed or mined, interest in its observation and exploration has waned in the twenty-first, as we focus on Mars and, um, Pluto? However before interest was lost, there was some discussion about terraforming the planet. Some of these ideas have to be read to be believed.


Terraforming Venus: Truth is weirder (and more hilarious) than fiction!

Can we terraform Venus?

Yes we can!
Maybe...

Note: if anyone reading this is affiliated with NASA or involved in this sort of research, I'm not laughing at your ideas. Well yes I am, but then who knows what's possible? They said men would never fly. They said the Earth was flat. They said the moon was not made of green... what? Really? You're sure about that, now, are you? Excuse me, I have to call my broker right away!

Making Venus habitable hinges on three important factors. First, lowering the temperature to at least a tolerable level that would not reduce any colonists to sticky slop on the ground. Second, filter the atmosphere: that carbon dioxide might be great for plants (not that there are any on Venus, as there is no water and they’d just burn up anyway) but it ain’t good for we humans, and Venus’s atmosphere is chock-full of it. Finally, as Venus has no oxygen, we’d have to get some in there. Call in the Oxygen Board! What do you mean, you’re cutting us off as we didn’t pay our bill?

Here's a fellow nerd to explain some of how it might be done...

And here's another, with cool animations...


Mirror, mirror, in the sky...

Look, I’ve read some crazy things about the proposed exploration and colonisation of Venus, among them the idea of people floating around in balloons and sky cities (I ain’t kidding, you’ll see!) but glancing down I see the words “space mirror” and, well, it’s like candy to me. I got to go see what this is about.

Oh, man! That is like something out of Futurama. Except, it’s real. Apparently. The idea is to combat the “two-month Venusian night” by having a 1,700 metre mirror on a satellite orbiting the planet, in order to dispel the darkness and light up the planet with the “luminosity of 10-20 moons.” Oh, dear. What else is there? This is comical.

Because it’s there. Well, not yet it’s not, but it could be.

Okay, okay. Also proposed was a 50km-high mountain that would be so high that the temperatures at its summit would be tolerable for human habitation, and everyone would live on this mountain. Oh dear lord. If you go for a walk, John, make sure you don’t stray too close to the edge there. It’s a long way downnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn….!


Ice, Ice baby: once in a blue moon

Oh merciful heavens, my sides! Look, this may all be accepted as sound scientific practice, but I just can’t help laughing at some of these suggestions. How about crashing Venus into one of the ice moons on the outer edges of the solar system, where there is a plentiful supply of water in the ice there? Or is i the other way around? Yeah, probably. That should solve the water problem on the planet! How in the name of Captain Jean-Luc Picard are you supposed to do that? I worry about people like the guy who had this idea, one Paul Birch, especially when he quips “In theory, you could flick a pebble into the asteroid belt and send Mars crashing into the sun.” What? I mean, what? No, like, I really mean, what??

You’re fired, sun!

Futurists are weird people, but hey, this is a weird section, and to be honest, while supposedly all of this is doable, at least theoretically, it’s rare science can be laughed at, so I’m taking the opportunity where I can. I’m not saying these ideas are crazy, but, well, you decide. The latest one here is for a process called starlifting to occur. Apparently, this involves siphoning off part of the Sun’s hydrogen, via - wait for it - an ionised particle beam which he’s decided to call a hydro cannon - and aiming it at Venus. This is supposed to do two things: thin the dense atmosphere and introduce hydrogen into the atmosphere, which will then react with the carbon dioxide and create h20. Okay. And they let this guy out on his own? No, seriously, I’m asking.

Taking the air - literally!

Even our buddy Carl Sagan has been at it. First he proposed, early in the sixties, introducing genetically engineered biological life forms into Venus’s atmosphere which would convert the carbon dioxide into carbon, but that idea was shot down. He admitted the plan was predicated on insufficient data, as the Enterprise computer was often fond of saying, in his book Pale Blue Dot, published thirty years later:

"Here's the fatal flaw: In 1961, I thought the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus was a few bars ... We now know it to be 90 bars, so if the scheme worked, the result would be a surface buried in hundreds of meters of fine graphite, and an atmosphere made of 65 bars of almost pure molecular oxygen. Whether we would first implode under the atmospheric pressure or spontaneously burst into flames in all that oxygen is open to question. However, long before so much oxygen could build up, the graphite would spontaneously burn back into CO2, short-circuiting the process."

Yeah, Carl: I don’t think we’re too bothered about whether we implode or burst into flames. We’d prefer to do neither, thanks.

Then he had the idea to smash asteroids into the planet so as to shake the atmosphere off the planet. I guess that wouldn’t work with most planets, as they have a strong enough magnetic field to retain their atmosphere, but Venus’s is really really weak. Cartoon-like though, it was realised that if they didn’t hit the planet hard enough and with enough asteroids the atmosphere might just hang around in space and then drift back down onto the planet. What a waste! The planet could even regenerate its lost atmosphere through a process called outgassing, apparently.

And hey: let’s not forget that a mere few tens of millions of kilometres away is a planet we all know and love, and personally, the idea of bouncing bloody great rocks off our nearest neighbour in an attempt to get it to do a Taylor Swift and shake it off worries me. What if one bounced our direction? D’oh! We’re talking about rocks at least 700 km across - that’s like twice the size of Vienna - and not just one. They reckon it would take two thousand impacts! With that many asteroids of that size, can you really expect one or two not to go off-course and head our way? “Hey, it didn’t work, but look on the bright side: at least we flattened Jersey!”

I, uh, I don’t think his elevator goes all the way to the top floor, if you know what I mean!

Oh yeah, they’re real, at least hypothetically. Space elevators. Sounds like something out of science fiction, but here’s the deal. A cable is anchored to the planet and out into space, where, um, competing gravitational forces apparently hold it up, and then vehicles can travel along the cable, up and out of the atmosphere and into space. Are you shitting me? Would any of us even consider such a mode of transportation? You know what happens when one of those cable cars in Switzerland goes down, right? Well as it happens we would need this magic cable to be made out of a super-strong material which does not yet exist, so don’t get your space-climbing boots on just yet! And as a solution for Venus, it’s out even if we had the materials, due to the thickness of the atmosphere and the height of the planet’s geostationary orbit. Uh-huh.

Then there’s the space fountain. I am being serious! Listen, a tower created by a space fountain might work, it says here. Pellets are shot upwards in a stream to a ground station abo - what? I have no idea what kind of pellets, though I doubt they’re the type you load your BB gun with. Don’t ask stupid questions while I’m outlining a stupid idea. Well it sounds stupid, but what do I know? Anyway where was I? Oh yeah. The stream of pellets is directed downwards from the station at the top (I don’t know how! Didn’t I ask you to stop asking questions? Here, have some jelly babies) and, so it says, “the necessary force for this deflection supports the structure at the top and the payloads going up”. Sure it does. Will. Would. Might. Oh look! The downside is apparently that if the containment fails and the stream breaks you’re SOL. All I can say is I wouldn’t want to be using one of these space fountains during space rush hour. Or, you know, ever. If I want to leave this planet, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, in a rocket ship. Or by getting high. Or reading a book.

The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades

Solar shades sound like something a planet might wear to look cool, but in fact they are proposed actual parasols in space that would, I guess, presumably be mounted on a satellite? I don’t know, I’m in the dark here (pun!) but the idea is pretty simple at its core (other, less immediately obvious pun), in that the shade thrown on Venus by these parasols (presumably again there’d have to be a lot of them, or they’d have to be really big) would reduce the heat and therefore cool down the planet. Placed in the correct position (no I am not going to use the proper scientific designation, that’s not what we’re about here) it could also deflect the radiation from the sun and block the solar wind.

And now it gets funny.

The proposed size of this theoretical shade is, wait for it, four times the size of Venus itself. But that’s not the best part, oh no. If left to itself without supervision, the thing is expected to act as a solar sail, and just bugger off on its merry way, leaving Venus unshaded and NASA seriously out of pocket with no result to show for all that expenditure. So to prevent this rather embarrassing but certainly amusing accident from occurring, the idea is to either make it an artificial, controlled satellite, or staitite (I guess a portmanteau of static and satellite?) or - and here we’re back to mirrors again - install huge mirrors at the poles which could reflect the light back at the rear of the solar panel and balance them, keeping them in orbit.

Float, float on…

Ah, we’re finally dealing with those floating cities which occasioned so much mirth a while back. Yes, it’s true. If we can’t live at the top of miles-high mountains we can just drift about like those guys in Gulliver’s Travels, or like the drifting never-ending party in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Or even like those, well, floating cities in Star Trek. Here’s the supposed hard science, though for my money there’s a fiction missing at the end, and possibly even a humorous before it.

Human-breathable air is a lifting gas (as those of you who read my Aviation journal, particularly the section on the history of ballooning, will know, early balloons were filled with simple oxygen before others got around to using hydrogen and then helium) and in Venus’s dense carbon dioxide-rich air would provide sixty percent of the lifting power of helium back home. Venus is a beautiful planet - until you hit the tops of the clouds on the way down. It’s just the surface, the atmosphere, the clouds, all that area, that’s shitty. If we could live - to quote the title of again my aviation journal - above the clouds, we’d be laughing. Well, I’d be laughing that’s for sure.

So, cities drifting along lazily at an altitude of about fifty kilometres above the ground, inhabitants enjoying both the Earthlike atmosphere and temperatures ranging from 0 to 50 C would only have to worry about those pesky winds I mentioned, which blow every four or five days around the planet at a speed of up to 340 kph. Right. For some reason, the eggheads don’t seem to think this is a problem. I personally wonder what it would be like to look out of your apartment window into the clear blue sky and say “wind’s not bad today! Only 300 kph!” as your best friend goes sailing by, madly hanging on to his smaller apartment. Also, how are you supposed to eat while up there? Where is anything going to grow? What about cattle and livestock? Would they adjust to being permanently in the air?

Look, I’m just going to copy/paste these paragraphs from Wiki. Note the first is headed “advantages”. (Bolded text is added by me).

Advantages

Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates rather than an explosive decompression, giving time to repair any such damages.[11] In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, protection from the acidic rain and on some occasions low level protection against heat. Alternatively, two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.[14] Therefore, putting on or taking off suits for working outside would be easier. Working outside the vehicle in non-pressurized suits would also be easier.[15]

Remaining problems

Structural and industrial materials would be hard to retrieve from the surface and expensive to bring from Earth/asteroids. The sulfuric acid itself poses a further challenge in that the colony would need to be constructed of or coated in materials resistant to corrosion by the acid, such as PTFE (a compound consisting wholly of carbon and fluorine).

Yeah. I don’t see not having to wear a spacesuit to go to the shops or football practice or the office necessarily an advantage, guy? And to categorise the fact that “any rips or tears” won’t explode the balloon? Um, isn’t this damning with faint praise? Shouldn’t they be saying there is no possibility of rips or tears? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but if I’m living in a city carried around on a potentially hostile, even deadly planet by fucking balloons, I really don’t want to hear the words rip, tear or christfuck explosive decompression! And under “Remaining problems” (as if those weren’t enough) we have two words which, again, nobody floating around in a balloon wants to consider: sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid that falls from the clouds in showers of rain. All in all, I’d take my chances on the ground, thanks.

So, who’s first to sign up for the wonderful Floating Balloon City on Venus? Anyone? Hello? Hello?

By the way, as an aside, you have to give it to NASA. Setting up a study to examine the feasibility of an atmospheric crewed mission to Venus, they called it the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept. That’s right: HAVOC. Is there something wrong with these people, or have they just all got a twisted and warped sense of humour? Havoc? Why not call it Operation Doom while they’re at it?

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Back down to Earth, or I should say, Venus: it’s time for those specs again!

Distance from the Sun: 107,000,000 km
Distance from Earth: 233,000,000 km
Mass: 0.815 Earths
Volume: 0.857 Earths
Surface Gravity: 0.9g
Pressure: 92 Atmospheres (ATM)
Satellites: None
Axial tilt: 2.64 degrees
Temperature: 464 degrees C
Length of day: 244 Earth days
Length of year: 227 Earth days
Atmosphere: almost entirely Carbon Dioxide

Probes sent

It should be noted for posterity and accuracy that in 1961 Russia - then the Soviet Union, or USSR - made two unsuccessful attempts to send probes to Venus, one of which exploded on the launch pad, the other of which did make its destination but had a catastrophic failure and was unable to send back any data. The US also tried with Mariner 1 in 1962, but this failed to achieve orbit and was destroyed, while the Russians gave it one more go literally two days before the launch of the second US attempt (which ended up being successful), but again the orbiter malfunctioned and this third attempt was also a failure, allowing the hated Americans to get there first. Maybe they saw it as revenge for Sputnik.

Russia would try a total of eight more times between 1962 and 1967, and rather interestingly finally succeed in launching its ninth probe two days before the next American one (there had been no further missions by the USA in the interim, possibly due to Vietnam?) and arriving in Venusian orbit literally one day ahead of it.

Note also that due to the fact that the Cold War was freezing both superpowers, and trust was at a minimum between them, information about the Soviet space programme was seriously and jealously guarded, and so the details we have here on their probes to Venus may be a little sketchy, but they’re all I could find.

Mariner 2

Launched: August 1962
Reached Destination: December 1962
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Measured the temperature of Venus, confirmed no real variance across the surface of the planet, also studied the solar wind, thickness of Venus’s atmosphere, clouds. Mass estimated, confirmation of its rotating clockwise and its speed, and updated information on the astronomical unit size.
Photographs taken: None (No camera on board)
Mission ended: 1963
Termination of probe: n/a; still in heliocentric orbit (orbit around the Sun)

Venera 4

Launched: June 12 1967
Reached Destination: October 18 1967
Type: Atmospheric Entry
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Analysis (for the first time) of Venus’s atmosphere while within that atmosphere, measurements of the weakness of the magnetic field, confirmation (at the time - almost more educated speculation really) of the absence of water.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: October 18 1967
Termination of Probe: Crashed on surface

Mariner 5

Launched: June 14 1967
Reached Destination: October 19 1967
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Analysis of the atmosphere, temperature, magnetic field
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: October 14 1968 (technically, December 4 1967, after which contact was lost but re-established briefly in 1968)
Termination of Probe: Remains in heliocentric orbit

Venera 5

Launched: January 5 1969
Reached Destination: May 16 1969
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Confirmed temperature, pressure and atmospheric readings sent back by Venera 4; was the first man-made probe to land on Venus.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: May 16 1969
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface of Venus less than an hour after landing, due to the immense atmospheric pressure.

Venera 6

Launched: January 10 1969
Reached Destination: May 17 1969
Type: Atmospheric
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Sent back data on samples taken from the atmosphere
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: May 17 1969
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface, like its predecessor

Venera 7

Launched: August 17 1970
Reached Destination: December 15 1970
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Further information on the composition of Venus’s atmosphere, surface temperature and for the first time, weak but definite signals confirming the planet has a solid surface and that there is (or was thought at the time) no water there. On landing, the vehicle seems to have fallen on its side, which scrambled the data it was sending back. This is thought to have been due to initial partial, and then complete failure of its descent parachute, leading to a harder landing than anticipated. Nevertheless, Venera 7 attained the distinction of being the first man-made probe to land safely on another planet.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: December 15 1970
Termination of Probe: Probably shut down on the surface and likely crushed flat.

Venera 8

Launched: March 27 1972
Reached Destination: July 22 1972
Type: Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Confirmed the temperature and pressure readings of its predecessor, noted that the cloud cover did not extend far down to the surface, and from beneath the clouds the atmosphere was relatively clear. Also determined that the light on the surface would be conducive to the taking of photographs. Venera 8 became the first ever man-made probe to land successfully on another planet.
Photographs Taken: None
Mission Ended: July 22 1972
Termination of Probe: Crushed on the surface, again.

Mariner 10

Launched: November 3 1973
Reached Destination: February 4 1974 (before moving on to Mercury, its primary target)
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Mariner 10, though really intended as a probe to study Mercury, as we have seen in the article on that planet, became the first probe to send actual photographs back, though they were of course only from a flyby and so not very detailed. It was however able to photograph for the first time the clouds that cover Venus, and other instruments analysed the composition both of the clouds and the atmosphere itself.
Photographs Taken: 4,165
Mission Ended: February 13 1974 (for the Venus part of the mission - March 24 1975 for the full mission)
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Venera 9

Launched: June 8 1975
Reached Destination: October 20 1975
Type: Orbiter/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Took photographs for the first time of the surface of Venus, confirmed the light was about the same as Earth but without any direct sunshine due to the thick clouds above. Measured the atmosphere, pressure, the composition of the clouds and the surface temperature.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown (those secretive Russians!)
Mission Ended: October 22 1975 (Lander) / March 22 1976 (Orbiter)
Termination of Probe: Unknown

Venera 10

Note: tensions were so high during the Cold War, and each of the superpowers (USA and USSR) trusted the other so little that when this probe was launched, the Soviet Union claimed it was only an orbiter, though a lander was also attached. Western sources assumed they were lying, and as it turned out, they were.

Launched: June 14 1975
Reached Destination: October 26 1975
Type: Orbiter/Lander
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Measured surface windspeed, atmosphere, temperature and took more photographs of the surface of Venus.
Photographs Taken: Yes, but number unknown
Mission Ended: Believed to be June 1976
Termination of Probe: Unknown

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

IV: Magnificent Desolation: The Moon

Even if you have not the least interest in astronomy or the Heavens, we’ve all seen the Moon in the sky. It’s impossible to miss, unless you happen to stay indoors and never venture outside at night, or only go out when the cloud cover is thickest. And even if so, you’ll still have seen it on the telly. Of all the celestial objects written about, it’s probably the one most featured in song, story, poetry, movies and television, and music. Even perhaps moreso than the Sun, the Moon has a certain romantic attraction for us, if only because it is the biggest and brightest thing in the sky at night, and so has become identified with night-time pursuits, from smuggling and robbery (to the practitioners of which it is an unwelcome intruder) to romance (where it is usually welcome). It’s a backdrop to the night for us, something across which bats or birds or - occasionally - a boy on a bicycle with his pet alien - travel, silhouetted briefly by the pale yellow disc. It’s been described as looking down, hiding, sailing on the clouds and many other poetic and lyrical themes have been afforded it.

It’s also the only - at the time of writing - other body in our solar system to which we have physically travelled ourselves, and on which we have set our feet. It represents humankind’s first tentative gropings out in the dark, our brief escape from our home planet, and our first manner foray into space. It exerts more than a romantic or fascinating influence on us though. The Moon controls the ebb and flow of the tides, allowing the Earth’s oceans to be regulated, and of course it usually lights up our night sky, a sort of natural light bulb that throws back the veil of darkness which would otherwise swallow us for anything from ten to twelve hours a day. It’s the nearest object to Earth, and therefore appears as the largest celestial object in our night sky, occasionally also visible during the day at certain times of the year and at certain latitudes. It features, not surprisingly, in most ancient mythologies, in which it is almost universally seen as being female, from Diana to Selene to Inanna, and usually the pale consort of the great god of the sky and ruler of the day, the mighty Sun.

The Moon is also said to exert a strange influence upon certain people, causing mood swings and sometimes madness - hence the term lunatic - and in legend invokes the process of lycanthropy, where someone bitten by a werewolf is doomed to become one at the rising of the full moon. As it rotates around the sun - taking roughly twenty-eight days to complete a rotation - the amount of visible light varies, showing in different aspects as seen from Earth, from a tiny sliver (new moon) to a full sphere (full moon). Here’s a cool video for kids that explains and shows the phases. Hey, it’s about our level, right?


Our home planet is the only one in the solar system with just the one moon, and though there are several theories as to how it formed, the mostly accepted one is that a large planet or body the size of Mars impacted the Earth about four million years ago (ah I remember it well!) and the resultant debris, formed in a ring around Earth, eventually coalesced into our own natural satellite. This is known in astronomical circles as the “giant impact hypothesis”. The Moon has no atmosphere or course, and originally was much closer to Earth than it is today, hanging huge in the sky above us, but over time tidal friction caused it to move further away, till it occupied the distance it does now, about 239,000 miles away.

Gravity is much lower on the Moon than on Earth, as anyone who has watched the Apollo missions will know, those of us old enough to remember Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing along as if they weighed nothing. Basically a big iron rock, the Moon has volcanic craters - one of them being the second-largest confirmed impact crater in the solar system - and ridges, and areas in between known as “maria”, Latin for seas, such as Mare Tranquilitatis and Mare Imbrium etc. Without an atmosphere to slow down and burn them up in, meteorites and asteroids have marked the surface of the Moon with many large craters, giving it a pock-marked appearance that can be seen almost with the naked eye, but certainly through a telescope. This probably gave rise to the old idea of the “Man in the Moon”, the face formed by features such as craters and maria.

Although it was believed there could be no water on the Moon, recent research suggests that, rather like Mercury, this may exist in some form, perhaps as ice, in areas near the poles which are in constant shadow. The Moon is surrounded by a permanent dust cloud, from the millions of comet particles that strike the surface, estimated at about five tons a day. With no wind to move them around and no atmosphere to absorb them, they remain above the surface of the Moon, rising to about 100 km. The coldest temperatures ever recorded in the solar system are not on Pluto, but the Moon, in dark, frozen caverns at the poles, where the temperature has been measured at - 238 degrees Celsius at the south pole and - 247 at the north.

Lunar Eclipse

We’ve discussed solar eclipses in the chapter on the Sun, but there are of course lunar eclipses, when the Moon is in Earth’s shadow and the two objects are more or less in a direct line with the Sun, in what is known as a state of syzygy. Because it is far closer to the Earth, though much smaller than the Sun, the Moon appears during a lunar eclipse to be the same size as our native star, and so can “block” it. Lunar eclipses only occur during a full moon, and unlike solar ones can be watched with the naked eye as they are nowhere near as bright. The moon at full eclipse does not turn black, as it does in a solar one, due to the sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere and being refracted, giving it a reddish colour, often called a “blood moon”. This is also used in Christian belief to signify the expected Second Coming of Christ and the Rapture (Judgement Day), tied in to a passage in the Book of Revelations in the Bible where John mentions the moon turning to blood.

Unlike solar eclipses, which occur but rarely, lunar eclipses happen at least twice and sometimes five times a year, though few of them are total eclipses.
Lunar eclipses were of course viewed with suspicion, dread and fear by our ancestors, most of whom believed some sort of beast or demon was swallowing or eating the moon, and it could only portend bad times ahead. The Hindus, though, believed that bathing in the Ganges after a lunar eclipse was opportune, as it would help them achieve salvation. Why? I have no idea. Ask them. A rather amusing, in a dark way, story comes from the Mesopotamians, always good for a laugh, who believed that a lunar eclipse was the result of seven demons attacking the moon, and fearful that the demons would then turn upon their king, they got someone to stand in so that he would be attacked instead of the king. Once the eclipse was over, this helpful gent was poisoned. I doubt there were too many applicants for that job!

As late as the nineteenth century, the Chinese were still trying to ward off the dragon who was believed to eat the moon, and while traditionally this had been achieved through the ringing of bells, these modern lads used navy artillery to scare off the big lizard. That’ll show it who’s boss round here!

Moonwatching: Early Observation


Being the closest and most visible celestial object, the Moon has of course been studied since antiquity, and while Americans may have been the first to tread on its surface, I’m proud to say that the first ever depiction of the moon is in Ireland. In a burial passage in Knowth, in Drogheda, there is a representation on a rock which is believed to date back about five thousand years. In your face, America! Of course the Babylonians, well known historical and scientific eggheads, had been studying the Moon since the fifth century BC, and those clever Chinese were already able to predict lunar eclipses a century later, and in 428 BC Asterix sorry Anaxagoras, an ancient Greek astronomer, sussed that the Moon was a big rock in space, and so was the Sun. Well, one out of two ain’t bad.

A pretty big deal in the second century BC was when Seleucus of Seleucia (did they name the city after him, or him after the city I wonder?) worked out that tides were controlled by the Moon. I mean, this was before anyone knew what a telescope was, or even what the Moon truly was. That’s mighty impressive. Not to be outdone, Aristarchus (who did not found Arista Records) gave working out the distance to the Moon a shot, and got it reasonably accurate, though later Ptolemy brushed up his figures and got more or less the correct measurement.

And then came our mate Galilieo.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the Italian father of astronomy made big inroads into our understanding of our nearest and only satellite. He used his cool new invention, the Galileoscope (well, the telescope then), to make drawings of the surface of the Moon, and could prove that it wasn’t, as his predecessors had all thought, smooth and without features. In fact, he detected craters and basins and mountains, though it would be another two hundred and fifty years almost before a proper geological and topographical map of the Moon could be produced.

Because the Moon is in synchronous rotation with the Earth (you surely don’t need me to explain that term, do you?) the same face is always turned towards us. This gives rise to the idea of a dark side of the moon, but as yer man says on the Pink Floyd album, there is no dark side, it’s just that we only see one side, and so the other seems dark to us all the time. The actual, proper term for the two sides of the Moon is the near side and - wait for it - the far side. Although the Moon has no tectonic plates to crash into and move against one another as they do here, causing earthquakes, tidal stress means that there are frequent “Moonquakes”, though usually nothing on the order of even mild ones on Earth.

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It’s Only a Paper Moon: The Moon in Popular Culture, Literature and the Media

As I noted in the introduction, the Moon has played a huge role in everything from poetry and prose to movies as the centuries have gone by, and while a list of all works of fiction referring to or about or regarding the Moon would take till Christmas - 2024 probably - let’s take a look at some examples. As usual, we’ll do a timeline.

2 AD - 1550

Possibly the first story written that is set on the moon was Lucian’s second-century novel A True Story, which describes a trip to the Moon and the people who live there.

Related in another of my journals, the tenth-century Japanese folk tale The Bamboo Cutter features a beautiful girl, the Moon Princess, adopted by a bamboo cutter and his wife, and returning to her home the Moon at the end of the story.

If you thought that one weird, try Ludovico Ariosto’s 1516 epic poem Orlando Furioso, in which a knight has to fly to the Moon (in Elijah’s chariot, no less) to recover the wits of his friend, who has gone mad. Ariosto envisioned, for some reason, the Moon as the place where all things lost went, and so the knight finds the eponymous protagonist’s wits and returns them to him, after which he becomes sane again.

Or for weirder, how about The Buried Moon, in which the Moon goes for a stroll on Earth and falls into a bog, where it is imprisoned by “evil creatures” and has to be rescued and set free by men. Right.

1541 saw the publication of Somnium by Juan Maldonado, an early form of satire of manners, while five years later John Heywood claimed that “the Moon is made of greene cheese.” Well if it is, Neil Armstrong certainly isn’t saying anything about it.

Francis Godwin had his hero pulled to the Moon in a chariot drawn by geese, in The Man in the Moone in 1638, and this inspired Cyrano de Bergerac to write Voyage dans la Lune twenty years later, though for propulsion our Cyrano used good old fireworks. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1705 of voyages from China to the Moon in The Consolidator and German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe had his Baron Munchausen visit the Moon in 1786, while Washington Irving wrote of the Conquest of the Moon in 1806.

Many of these stories were of course allegories, satires or pure fantasy, and not one of them featured, or could feature, actual facts about the Moon, so everything had to be made up. An exception would be Somnium (The Dream) (1634) by actual astronomer Johannes Kepler, in which he did at least expound some theories, though in the guise of fiction, and Vejamen de la Luna (A Satirical Tract on the Moon) by Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, coincidentally published in the same year, though Kepler wrote his in 1610 and de Ribera in 1626), which seems to have referred to the theories of Kepler and Galilieo.

Timeline: 1800 - 1960

The Great Moon Hoax

On August 25, the following story appeared in the Sun, a New York newspaper:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES
LATELY MADE
BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.
At the Cape of Good Hope
[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]

Along with this drawing, purporting to be of an inhabitant of the Moon.

From the above headline it can be seen that the idea was that the information came from no less respected a source than the famous astronomer, John Herschel. The article claimed that life had been discovered on the Moon, thanks to an incredibly powerful new telescope, and that there were animals such as bison and goats, and weirder creatures like beavers who had no tails and walked on two legs, and men who had bat wings. It was also announced that there were trees, oceans and beaches on the Moon. This was all apparently related by one Dr. Andrew Grant, said to be the travelling companion of Dr. Herschel. He was of course completely made up.

The article became a series, as people hungrily bought up copies of The Sun (is it ironic that a story about the Moon was published in a paper called The Sun?) running for six in all, until eventually it was announced that the great new telescope had suffered catastrophic failure as it had unwittingly acted as a lens for the sun, which had then set fire to the observatory.

The man believed to have been behind the hoax was Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for The Sun who had taken exception to some of the wild theories astronomers were floating about the Moon, and also to lampoon a cleric, Reverend Thomas Dick (well named, add head) who had the crazy idea that every single planet in the solar system was jammed with life, and used the population of Britain as a yardstick to calculate how crowded our neighbours would be, coming up with the grand total of just over twenty-one trillion. Right. A few out there, Reverend! This meant that the Moon must have, according to Dick’s calculations, about four billion people living on it.

The main reason though for the hoax was, as it has always been for reporters and editors, to sell more copies of the paper. Interestingly, it took six weeks before the hoax was revealed, and even then The Sun did not issue a retraction. Their circulation certainly increased though, and remained high even after the hoax was admitted. Also interestingly, Herschel was amused initially at the article, saying that it was certainly more colourful than anything he could talk about, but later he got pissed off that so many people believed it was true and kept asking him stupid questions about it.

Edgar Allan Poe was less amused. He claimed that the article ripped off a story he and written and he was probably right as - get this - Locke was his editor! Well then that seals it, doesn’t it? But there’s more. The story Poe wrote was first published as a supposedly true account in June, only two months before Locke’s articles began, in another newspaper, the Southern Literary Messenger, but nobody took it seriously because, well, he didn’t write it as a serious account. So he was probably annoyed not only that Locke stole his idea, but that the reporter got a lot more traction with it, making people believe where the great horror writer could not. Undaunted, Poe later published The Balloon Hoax in 1844, but that’s nothing to do with the Moon so we won’t go into that. Good to see though that, in true Poe style, he did get his bloody revenge, by publishing his hoax in the same paper, The Sun. All right, not a bloody revenge, not really a revenge at all, as he had to retract it two days later, but still, he played them at their own game.

The story he had written was called The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall, published in 1835, which described the protagonist using a giant balloon to reach the Moon, and while surely ripped off by Locke, it must have been the inspiration for the next one on our list.

The Princess of the Moon: A Confederate Fairy Story, written in 1860 by Cora Semmes Ives, envisions Moon men repelling an invasion of Union soldiers, who arrive in balloons. I find this interesting because, even if it does take much of the idea from Poe, while I haven’t looked at everything on the list, this seems to me to be the first properly political story using the Moon as a backdrop, and also kind of transposing the Civil War there.

Then of course in 1865 there was the classic Jules Verne novel, From the Earth to the Moon which would later be adapted by George Melies and become one of the world’s first properly-animated live action movies, as well as the first ever science fiction one. Less than forty years later another legendary writer would pen The First Men in the Moon (1901), as H.G.Wells ruminated upon the properties of a gravity-resistant element called Cavorite, the story containing his usual commentary upon man’s warlike nature.

Around about now the medium of film began to appear, and as mentioned above we have La Voyage dans le Lune (1901) making history as the first ever science fiction movie, then shortly afterwards Fritz Lang brought out Frau im Mond (Woman of the Moon) in 1929, followed by Wells’s Things to Come in 1936.

In 1925, J.R.R. Tolkein wrote Roverandom, a story about a dog having adventures on the Moon, to console his child for the loss of his favourite toy dog. A few years later Hugh Lofting published Doctor Doolittle in the Moon (1928) - not quite sure why it’s “in” rather than “on”, as is more usual, and C.L. Moore described in his Lost Paradise in 1936 how the Moon changed from a fertile planet to the empty barren rock it is today. C.S. Lewis was typically championing Christianity when he wrote That Hideous Strength in 1945, though for some reason he calls the Moon Sulva, and in 1948 Disney had the love interest of one of the characters in his movie Melody Time thrown up to the Moon. Missing her, the protagonist howls up at the Moon, and is joined in sympathy by the coyotes, explaining (in a Disney way) why coyotes howl at the Moon.

Both Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned a first human flight to the moon in 1970 and 1978 respectively, the former writing in 1939 and the latter in 1951. Asimov was closest of course, being only one year out while Clarke missed it by nine, but still remarkably prescient. Clarke used the Moon as a backdrop for a later novel, Earthlight in 1955 and again in 1961 with A Fall of Moondust. Although Earthlight featured a human colony on the Moon, it was not the first to do so, that honour going to the less well-known Bohun Lynch, who in 1925 published the appropriately B-movie-titled Menace From the Moon.

The science fiction writer who used the Moon as a setting for his stories and novels the most though appears to be the prolific Robert A. Heinlein, who, between 1940 and 1966 wrote no less than twelve, including Rocketship Galilieo (1947), The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949), Nothing Ever Happen On the Moon (1949) and of course his classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). He would later turn Rocketship Galileo into Destination Moon, an important science fiction movie released in 1950.

Timeline: 1960 - 2000

In terms of movies, the big one of course was 2001: A Space Odyssey, though it only features the Moon in early scenes, but just as film began to grow up in the early part of the twentieth century, it found itself with a baby brother, television, and this medium was not slow to capitalise on the interest in science fiction, with the Moon again being one of the major backdrops, probably second only at this point to Mars. The Moonbase, a short series shown in 1967, predates and foreshadows Gerry Anderson’s highly successful Space:1999, of which more later, but most science fiction television shows preferred to show the deeps of space, alien creatures, alternate worlds, and shied away from the more prosaic setting of the Moon.

Film, on the other hand, featured the Moon in such releases as Flash Gordon (1980), two Superman movies (II and IV, 1980 and 1987), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Starship Troopers (1997), The Fifth Element[/i] (also 1997) and, um, Airplane II (1982). TV series began to catch up with episodes of Doctor Who and the aforementioned Space: 1999, in which the Moon was torn from its orbit by a nuclear war on Earth and send hurtling through space, complete with a very surprised Moonbase crew.

Given its harsh, remote and rugged features, the Moon has often been used as the setting for penal colonies in science fiction. 2000 AD's Judge Dredd had one called Luna City One, and we’ve already discussed Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in which the Moon again is used for keeping prisoners, well, imprisoned. More usually though it is seen as a place for either colonisation or bases, such as in Star Cops, where it is a police base, The Moonbase and Space: 1999 as well as Anderson’s other show, UFO, and it is also the base for the Justice League of America in DC Comics. Or they have a big telescope there. Or something. I'm not well up on Justice League. Batty will tell you. The Moon is a colony in, among others, Starship Troopers and The Fifth Element, while in Futurama is has been turned into a giant Disney-like theme park.

Of course, the Moon features in titles of movies, book, songs, plays, poems and other forms of media as merely a word, often nothing to do with the actual Moon, in musical compositions such as “Blue Moon”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Walking on the Moon” and of course Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, films like Moon Over Parador and Hunter’s Moon and books with titles such as Paper Moon or The Moon’s a Balloon. Which science has proven not to be the case. Even outside of science fiction and fantasy, the Moon continues to exercise as much of an influence over our imagination and our emotions as it does over our tides.

And then there’s lycanthropy.

I haven’t been able to find any plausible explanation or reason for why werewolves are or were linked with the full moon, but I will guess that maybe it had to do with the idea of werewolves being seen as evil creatures and the worship of the moon as a pagan deity? Really not sure, but folklore and certainly later literature on the subject in fantasy and horror fiction holds that a person bitten by a werewolf would only transform into one themselves at the full of the moon. This is also linked to the idea that the full moon adversely affects some individuals’ minds, ranging from heightened anxiety to actually sending them into a frenzy, hence, as I already noted, the word lunatic. Perhaps because animals are meant to bay at the full moon too (maybe because it’s at its most visible when full)? I don’t know; I’m no expert on werewolves, and here we’re only concerned with the Moon.

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Trollheart

Speaking of (and returning to) which, it’s time for this.


It’s time for some boring figures. Sigh. Let’s get on with it then.

Distance from Sun: 70,000,000 Km - 49,000,000 km (Because Mercury’s orbit is so eccentric, two figures have to be used, one for when it’s closest to the Sun - Aphelion - and one for when it’s furthest away - Perihelion)
Distance from Earth: (approx) 400,000 kms
Diameter: 1,076 km (about a quarter that of Earth)
Density: 3.344 g/cm
Surface gravity: 0.1654g
Satellites: None; it is one. And our only one.
Atmosphere: None
Length of day: 29.5 Earth days
Length of year: 27 Earth days
Axial tilt: 1.542 degrees
Mass: 0.012 Earths
Volume: 0.02 Earths
Surface Temperature Range: -23 to -173 degrees Centigrade
Weather: None

Okay then, that’s done with. Back to the - more or less - fun stuff.

Exploration of the Moon: Probes and Missions

As the Moon is the only planetary body we have so far explored ourselves, as in, not sent unmanned probes but actual human beings to (at the time of writing) I’m for the first and only time going to break this up into two sections, one for probes (which should be taken to be understood as unmanned) and the other for missions (where rockets carried men into space).

Probes sent

Once again, those Russians were first, with their Luna program.

Luna 1
Launched: January 2 1959
Reached Destination: January 4 1959
Type: Intended as an impactor, but failed and instead became an orbiter
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: First man-made spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from Earth, first to visit another planetary body. Studied Earth’s radiation belt and outer space. Detected the lunar magnetic field. Observed and measured the solar wind.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: January 5 1959
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

A note here says that the Americans did not believe the Russians had reached the Moon, as they received no transmissions themselves, but it sounds like a case of sour grapes to me.

Luna 2
Launched: September 12 1959
Reached Destination: September 12 1959
Type: Impactor
Nationality: Soviet (Russian)
Results: Planted Soviet flag on surface of the Moon; confirmed previous measurement of the Van Allen belt but was unable to detect a radiation field around the Moon. Measured the solar wind flux. Became the first man-made object to impact another celestial body. Score another for the stinkin’ Commie Reds, huh?
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: September 13 or 14 1959
Termination of Probe: Impacted on the Moon.

In a direct response to the criticism from the USA about the previous probe, i.e. that they had made it all up, the Soviet space agency this time ensured to contact British astronomer Bernard Lovell in Manchester and provide to him all the data as the probe transmitted it. He then shared this with the American scientists, who seemingly grumbled that they still did not believe it, but no longer had any basis for such doubt.

Pioneer 3
Launched: December 6 1958
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Failed to reach the Moon, emulating David Bowie and falling to Earth
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: December 7 1958
Termination of Probe: Burned up in Earth’s atmosphere

Pioneer 4
Launched: March 3 1959
Reached Destination: March 3 1959
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Provided radiation data but went off-course and so was not close enough to the Moon for its photoelectric sensor to be triggered, thus no valuable information about the Moon was received.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: March 6 1959
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

As far as I can see, in the early space race the Russians were miles ahead. They put the first satellite into space, had the first man-made object to escape the Earth’s atmosphere, got to the Moon first, were the first to impact a satellite there, and later were the first to put a living creature (Leica the dog) and later a man into space, the first to spacewalk and the first to land a probe on Venus, the first to record sound and images on that planet. Sure, the Americans caught up, becoming the first humans to land on another planetary body, and from then on it was USA! USA! USA! all the way, but in the initial and perhaps more important early stages of space exploration, Russia, as in the Soviet Union, led the way.

The Ranger series, intended to compete with the mostly successful Luna Soviet satellite programme, could have more accurately been called Danger or Anger. The first six probes failed, and resentment arose in Congress over all the funds being appropriated for NASA with no real return; essentially a waste of money.

Ranger 1
Launched: August 23 1961
Reached Destination: Failed; only achieved Earth orbit
Type: Flyby
Nationality: American
Results: Very little as the probe didn’t leave Earth orbit. Some miscellaneous data about radiation or some shit.
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: August 30 1961
Termination of Probe: Burned up in Earth atmosphere after batteries ran down

After no less than four failed attempts at launch, plagued by problems and no doubt leaving the Soviets pissing themselves laughing at the decadent Americans’ incompetence, Ranger 1 finally launched on August 23. Immediately it began having problems and never got out of Earth orbit, hanging around until its batteries went flat and it fell back to Earth. Not quite the success NASA had anticipated or hoped for. Reports of many Russian sides being split are impossible to corroborate at this time.

Ranger 2
Launched: November 18 1961
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Test
Nationality: American
Results: n/a
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: November 20 1961
Termination of Probe: Fell back to Earth and burned up

If at first you don’t succeed, balls it up again. Well, that’s not quite fair. Ranger 2 was not meant to ever reach the Moon, it was merely a test vehicle to try to iron out the bugs that had bedevilled its predecessor. As it happened, it didn’t. Iron them out, that is, and it suffered from similar problems and only achieved low Earth orbit. Back to the drawing board, guys!

Ranger 3
Launched: January 26 1962
Reached Destination: Failed
Type: Flyby (intended as an impactor)
Nationality: American
Results: Complete failure
Photographs Taken: 0 (some very weak images were taken but nothing of interest)
Mission Ended: January 31 1962
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

If Russian pilots believed they were dogged by gremlins, little creatures who destroyed the electrics and mechanics in their planes during World War II, they must have moved over to live in America, as a year into the Ranger programme, three after the USSR had proudly planted the flag of the motherland on the Moon, NASA still couldn’t even line up their probes to reach the damn thing. Talk about hitting the broad side of a barn! Errors in telemetry sent Ranger 3 off course yet again, and then its computer died (damn you Bill Gates!) and that was more or less the end of it. Missed the Moon by several tens of thousands of kilometers and decided to spend the rest of its life in retirement in the sun, as it were. Noises began to emanate from Congress. “One more!” NASA pleaded. “Just one more. Or, maybe two. Three at the outside. Four, tops! We promise!”

Ranger 4
Launched: April 23 1962
Reached Destination: April 26 1962
Type: Impactor
Nationality: Proudly made in America
Results: n/a
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: April 26 1962
Termination of Probe: Crashed on lunar surface.

Hey, at least this time they reached the Moon! Problem was, everything failed. Although the launch was for once successful, problems began once the rocket lifted off and the solar panels failed to deploy on the satellite, then the computer grumped “Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Moon me arse!” and shut down. With no way to contact Ranger 3 and no way to control it, NASA could do nothing as it ploughed down onto the surface of the Moon without sending back any data. But at least the United States of America had finally landed something on another planetary body, and more, they landed on the far side of the Moon, not like those cowardly Russkies who had to land on the near side. Pussies.

NASA crowed that their probe was more sophisticated than Luna 2, which may be true, but the way you win the game is to put the ball in the back of the net, and the Soviet Union had proven to be (sorry not sorry if the football terminology confuses you: make up your own analogy) Manchester United while the USA was barely hanging on in the last relegation spot. Like, the Titanic may have been a hell of a lot more sophisticated than, say, the Mary Rose, but both went down the same way. Fucking Americans.

They were convinced they could do better. They had to, given all the taxpayer dollars they’d spent for nothing, and it wouldn’t be hard to do better anyway. So, fifth time lucky?

Ranger 5
Launched: October 18 1962
Reached Destination: October 21 1962
Type: Impactor
Nationality: American
Results: Another failure
Photographs Taken: 0
Mission Ended: October 21 1962
Termination of Probe: In heliocentric orbit

Close, but no cigar! Again the computer had a melt-down, switching, for some reason, from solar power to battery power, which is, I suppose, like seeing your laptop is down to three percent and, having plugged it in, removing the lead again. Or something. Anyway, the batteries were never built to last that long, and what do you know? They didn’t. Ranger 5 came the closest to the Moon (other than the one that crashed there of course), almost 450 miles short. Oooh! So close! Then off it went, riding into the sunset and leaving NASA techs tearing out their hair and no doubt congressmen and women and senators tearing up proposals for budgets.

Oh, but surely the next one would be the charm?
Yeah, about that…

In 1963 Congress had finally had enough and cut the budget for Ranger, slashing it by fifty percent. Thirteen planned probes had now to be cut to only nine, which meant NASA had only four last chances to make this work. It’s not surprising that their budget was halved: in many ways, the US Congress is like a bunch of investors, and one thing investors want is a return on their money. If they couldn’t get it back financially, Congress would want it back in terms of results, and so far, NASA had produced neither. In fact, all they had done was take the funds and basically piss them away on unreliable and shaky projects which either crashed, burned up or joined an increasingly large conga-line around the Sun. Something had to be done, or America would continue to be lampooned on Soviet State Television, probably, becoming the butt of such sarcastic retorts as “Da, comrade, I will believe that when an American reaches the Moon!”.

They set up an internal board of inquiry to try to get to the heart of why they were so shit at making probes, and one of the issues that surfaced was the involvement of the US Air Force, so that was terminated. Now NASA would have complete control and oversight over their own projects. They also bit the bullet and admitted they weren’t actually all that good at designing probes, and so outsourced the manufacture of the next Ranger probes to people who actually knew what they were doing. As 1964 began, they were ready to try again, fully aware that they were now on borrowed time. They had to show results or this time they would be completely shut down, and that would be it for the US space programme.

In terms of timing, it was both the best and the worst time for NASA. The US President had just been assassinated two months previous, and the nation was reeling from the shock. With his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, now in the White House, nobody was sure what the new president’s view on NASA’s money-down-the-drain record would be; would he lobby Congress to give them more time (and money) or less, or would he rely on and trust their recommendations, giving the space agency a short time in which to impress the new POTUS?

At the same time, with the country at its lowest ebb, the time might be right for a boost in morale, and if NASA could supply that - show that the Commies would not have it all their own way, and demonstrate that while the present was dark as night, the future could be bright - they might turn the weight of public opinion towards instead of against them. It really was make-or-break time for NASA, and they knew it.

Unfortunately, things did not quite go to plan.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

In 1961, as competition between the USSR and the USA heated up in what was known as the Space Race, the Race for Space or the Race to the Moon, American President John F. Kennedy, two years before his untimely death at the hands of an assassin in Dallas, and increasingly worried by the progress having been made by the Communist regime with their lunar orbiters, flyby probes and landers, in comparison to the limited success seen by the US, made this speech:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior.

We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations—explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the Moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there."

This led to the setting up of a space programme intended to allow NASA to create the conditions for sending crewed missions to the Moon, with the intention of humans eventually landing there. American humans of course. Thus was established the Apollo space programme.

Manned Missions

As this is not meant to be a history of that programme, but a list and information on vehicles that actually reached the Moon, whether they flew past it, orbited it or landed on it, I’m only going to concentrate on those missions which actually made it to the Moon, fulfilling those criteria. I must however make known my feelings here, that the only real reason the USA got to the Moon first was a case of “the end justifies the means” when they allowed Nazi scientist Werner von Braun, who had been responsible for Hitler’s “revenge weapons”, the V1 and V2 near the end of World War II, come to America and work for them rather than face trial at Nuremberg, as I believe he should have done.

How many innocent lives did this man’s weapons take, and how many died as a result of his implementation of the Nazi process of slave labour? Was he held accountable? Was he hell. His war record, in fact, was ignored and pushed to one side as long as America got what they wanted, and rather than be remembered as a war criminal and murderer, he now occupies a place in history as both “the father of rocketry” and the man who made it possible for humans to walk on the Moon. I think that’s a dark chapter in America’s history (not that it hasn’t got many of them anyway) that should not be forgotten.

I also understand, before anyone starts flag-waving, that had he somehow been spirited away by the Russians, they would have done the very same thing, and used his knowledge and expertise to get to the Moon before the Americans, also ignoring his war crimes. Generally, as humans, we fucking suck at morals and ethics, especially when national interests are involved.

A year after his historic speech promising to reach the goal of sending a man to the Moon, President Kennedy, in the state in which he would die a year later, reiterated and again justified and dedicated himself to this goal:

"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon ... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

Let’s be perfectly blunt and honest here: when Kennedy says “mankind” he means “America”, and he could easily have answered the question by saying “Because if we don’t, those Commie bastards will, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be the president on whose watch the Soviet Union got another one over on us, one we can never live down or overcome. Look people: they’re ahead of us. They got Sputnik into space, they sent a friggin’ dog into space, for Chrissakes! Then they went better with the first man in space and the first spacewalk! They got to the Moon before us. Do you really want them to tread those god-damned Commie jackboots all over its surface before we have a chance to? Come on people!” Or something similar. I think, really, that might have served to silence a lot of the dissenting voices raised against this enterprise, or at least made them look un-American. Oh well. One way or the other they went ahead anyway, and five years after his death, with his VP in the White House, and several test flights under their belt - and with the tragedy of the explosion of Apollo 1 on the launch pad with the loss of life of all crewmembers behind them - that day was about to dawn.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Plankton

I've used "...continued:" at times to help the reader along, but I'm a dork so there's also that.

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DianneW

well I get what your saying Plonker..I say to be continued at times but also see what Trollybookends is saying also..flip of a coin..I can see two sides as an outsider.....Your trying to make it clearer and to Trolls it is clear...

dork your not Plonker yes....