Veteran space journalist digs into the science and technology--past, present, and future--central to our explorations of Earth's only satellite, the space destination most hotly pursued today. In these rich pages, veteran science journalist Leonard David explores the moon in all its facets, from ancient myth to future "Moon Village" plans. Illustrating his text with maps, graphics, and photographs, David offers inside information about how the United States, allies and competitors, as well as key private corporations like Moon Express and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, plan to reach, inhabit, and even harvest the moon in the decades to come. Spurred on by the Google Lunar XPRIZE--$20 million for the first to get to the moon and send images home--the 21st-century space race back to the moon has become more urgent, and more timely, than ever. Accounts of these new strategies are set against past efforts, including stories never before told about the Apollo missions and Cold War plans for military surveillance and missile launches from the moon. Timely and fascinating, this book sheds new light on our constant lunar companion, offering reasons to gaze up and see it in a different way than ever before.

If by some magic process humanity was able to go to the stars tomorrow and find habitable worlds we would probably want to design a society based upon modern technology. We can't do this but we can look at our Earthbound society and think about how to redesign it so that it will work better. It is like a giant game of the SIMS but in the real world. This book examines how the exploration of space, specifically a commercial base on the Moon and Mars would transform our economies on the Earth as surely as the discovery of the New World transformed the old world of Europe. From Platinum Group Metals for fuel cells, manufacturing high tech metals and robots to the building of a fusion reactor, the Moon holds great promise for a high tech manufacturing future. This book takes a look and imagines how a world with such resources could be designed for our future.

A young Frenchman, Joseph Timar, travels to Gabon carrying a letter of introduction from an influential uncle.

This SpringerBrief explores the technological, economic, physiological, and psychological comparisons between a journey to the Moon versus a journey to Mars, taking into consideration the national and international perspectives at play. The author spent over six years interviewing leading space experts from around the world to learn why lunar habitats and the creation of a permanent presence on the Moon are an essential next step to human exploration and settlement in space. Practical reasons related to energy, telecommunications and networking, robotic systems, medical and scientific research, material processing, and more show why it must be the Moon First and Mars Second. These findings and recommendations have been adopted by current NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, as well as the current U. S. president. The research in this text reflects the author's experiences working internally within NASA Headquarters, the FAA Commercial Spaceflight Office, as well as the International Space University. It is partially based on Reneau’s award-winning Harvard thesis in conjunction with her Master's in International Relations.