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The Apollo Lunar Module, or simply Lunar Module, originally designated the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), was the lander spacecraft that was flown from lunar orbit to the Moon's surface during the U.S. Apollo program. It was the first crewed spacecraft to operate exclusively in the airless vacuum of space, and remains the only crewed vehicle to land anywhere beyond Earth.
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The Constellation Program is a cancelled crewed spaceflight program developed by NASA, the space agency of the United States, from 2005 to 2009. The major goals of the program were "completion of the International Space Station" and a "return to the Moon no later than 2020" with a crewed flight to the planet Mars as the ultimate goal. The program's logo reflected the three stages of the program: the Earth (ISS), the Moon, and finally Mars—while the Mars goal also found expression in the name given to the program's booster rockets: Ares. The technological aims of the program included the regaining of significant astronaut experience beyond low Earth orbit and the development of technologies necessary to enable sustained human presence on other planetary bodies.
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A space rendezvous is a set of orbital maneuvers during which two spacecraft, one of which is often a space station, arrive at the same orbit and approach to a very close distance. Rendezvous requires a precise match of the orbital velocities and position vectors of the two spacecraft, allowing them to remain at a constant distance through orbital station-keeping. Rendezvous may or may not be followed by docking or berthing, procedures which bring the spacecraft into physical contact and create a link between them.
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The Soviet crewed lunar programs were a series of programs pursued by the Soviet Union to land humans on the Moon, in competition with the United States Apollo program to achieve the same goal set publicly by President John F. Kennedy on 25 May 1961. The Soviet government publicly denied participating in such a competition, but secretly pursued two programs in the 1960s: crewed lunar flyby missions using Soyuz 7K-L1 (Zond) spacecraft launched with the Proton-K rocket, and a crewed lunar landing using Soyuz 7K-LOK and LK spacecraft launched with the N1 rocket. Following the dual American successes of the first crewed lunar orbit on 24-25 December 1968 and the first Moon landing on July 20, 1969, and a series of catastrophic N1 failures, both Soviet programs were eventually brought to an end. The Proton-based Zond program was canceled in 1970, and the N1-L3 program was de facto terminated in 1974 and officially canceled in 1976. Details of both Soviet programs were kept secret until 1990 when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of glasnost.
A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, on 13 September 1959.
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Moon Express is an American privately held early-stage company formed by a group of Silicon Valley and space entrepreneurs. It had the goal of winning the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, and of ultimately mining the Moon for natural resources of economic value. The company was not able to make a launch attempt to reach the Moon by March 31, 2018, the deadline for the prize. As of February 2020, Moon Express is focused on supporting NASA under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract.
SpaceIL is an Israeli organization, established in 2011, that was competing in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon. SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC. On 11 April 2019, during the landing procedure, a problem occurred in the final minutes of flight. Communications were lost with the spacecraft, long enough for the braking process to fail, and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface. The Beresheet mission had included plans to measure the Moon's magnetic field at the landing site, and was carrying a laser retroreflector, and a "time capsule" containing analog and digital information, created by the Arch Mission Foundation. Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth's orbit and was the first privately funded landing on the Moon. Though the spacecraft crashed, Israel became the seventh country to make lunar orbit and the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China to attempt a soft landing on the Moon.
Blue Moon is a robotic space cargo carrier and lander for making cargo deliveries to the Moon. Designed and operated by Blue Origin for use on a mission aimed for 2024, Blue Moon derives from the vertical landing technology used in Blue Origin's New Shepard sub-orbital rocket.
The SpaceX Starship system is a fully-reusable, two-stage-to-orbit, super heavy-lift launch vehicle under development by SpaceX since 2012, as a self-funded private spaceflight project.
The Artemis program is a US government-funded crewed spaceflight program that has the goal of landing "the first woman and the next man" on the Moon, specifically at the lunar south pole region by 2024. The program is carried out predominantly by NASA, U.S. commercial spaceflight companies contracted by NASA, and international partners such as the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Australian Space Agency (ASA). NASA is leading the program, but expects international partnerships to play a key role in advancing Artemis as the next step towards the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars.
The International Lunar Resources Exploration Concept (ILREC) was a proposed mission architecture under President George H. W. Bush's Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) by Kent Joosten, an engineer at Johnson Space Center. The plan would have used the help of international partners, mainly the Soviet Union, to assemble a lunar base and sustainable lunar transportation service.
References
- ↑ "Program Management". Lunar Lion. Retrieved May 2, 2018.
- ↑ "Lunar Lion team leader gives mission update to trustees". Penn State News. Retrieved November 25, 2013.
- ↑ http://news.psu.edu/story/367698/2015/08/31/academics/penn-state-lunar-lion-keeps-eyes-moon
- 1 2 Cappelli, Kathy. "Lunar lions complete first phase of rocket testing". The Daily Collegian . Retrieved November 25, 2013.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150926024402/http://lunarlion.psu.edu/puma-2-0-takes-shape/