blog.Jelmer Oosthoek.nl

I bought the book Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis and I like it very much. Its about space and all the resources we can extract when we decide to leave our cradle: Earth. There was also a chapter about the history of space exploration and I learned a lot by reading that. Its so strange to think all this space exploration stuff with rockets has only been done less than a century. And from V-2 rockets to the Viking Landers on Mars took only two decades! Imagine where we could be now if the Apollo project hadn’t been canceled.

One other striking thing I didn’t realize was that the medieval people thought the heavens to be perfect. The Sun, Moon and stars were believed to be immaterial objects and everything was perfect there. But comets and meteorites weren’t perfect so people explained them to be atmospheric things. And the Moon wasn’t a perfect featureless sphere because it showed the Earth reflection. Therefore the dark regions on the Moon were called ‘mare’ meaning seas. There were even people trying to map them and link them to the terrestrial maps, mirrored of course.

The book contains a lot of these facts. Another one is the Surveyor mission to the Moon. It was an unmanned lander mission prior to the manned Apollo mission. There were seven landers of which only two crashed. The cool thing about this mission is the fact that the Apollo 12 astronauts landed near Surveyor 3 and took the camera home with them! That would be great with the Viking Landers or with the MER rovers on Mars!