By Kirk Jones (2044)
I love fireworks and its too bad that here on the Moon we do not celebrate new years eve the old fashioned way. However we do have our share of fireworks, albeit a more natural version: meteor showers. Especially the Quadrantid meteor shower makes all of us lunars to go outside. These showers are a feast to the eye indeed. The fireworks isn’t due to the meteors striking the Lunar surface like in the old days. No, now we have lasers! Each station has its own state of the art 3D radar and laser meteor tracking system. A high energy laser pulse is used to destroy the object before it could reach the ground. This causes the fireworks… The range of the system is a staggering 50 kilometers. If I’m not mistaken there are around X meteors per square kilometer per hour during the most active part of the meteor shower.
I read an article recently about the Lunar mapping conventions. It’s about how newly discovered Lunar surface features should be named. I was struck by the fact that even though we have detailed one centimeter resolution topo and photographical maps of the lunar surface humans still haven’t looked at every image in full resolution! The images have been processed by feature recognition routines but there are surely still a lot of things to be discovered. One recent example, which was mentioned in the article, was a 20 cm object found in a small crater. The object turned out to be a part of the SMART-1 satellite. It crashed on the Moon back in 2006. It was made by the Europeans and contained all sorts of miniature remote sensing equipment. Miniature in those days of course. The object was secondary impact debris which had shot back into space after the main impact located a couple of kilometers northwest. It will be displayed in the Lunar History Museum in New Apollo Station. Yeay, I know, we really have to do something with that name. Lets name it Frontier City or Lunapolis as I mentioned before.
Today of course it’s so normal to see brand names everywhere on the Moon but this hasn’t always been the case. In the old days – the first decade of the 21st century lunar exploration – most money was government money, e.g. taxpayer money. Then the Google Lunar X Prize was initiated where only privately funded teams was allowed. To win the prize a robot had to land on the Moon and travel 500 meters while making pictures and acquiring other data. To raise enough money sponsors were needed. These provided money for the teams and in return their brand name was displayed on the Moon. From our current viewpoint we would expect it were terrestrial oil or mining companies who were the main sponsors but that wasn’t the case. These companies would jump on the bandwagon much later, at that time they were still waiting for the cat to jump. No, the first sponsors were major brand drink and food companies. Companies who liked the extra attention but really had any business on the Moon. The sponsoring also didn’t include much regulation, it was just a simple matter of “I give you money, you display our brand name”. The Coca Cola Moon Orbiter is a good example, the company who build it, InnovaMine Inc., was interested in deploying a new type of magnetometer on a satellite but didn’t have the money to build a satellite around it. Then came the Coca Cola Company and the problem was solved. Nowadays of course all sorts of difficult arrangements between sponsor and space exploration companies exist. A lot of lobbyists and consultancy companies aid the matching. Strange things happen now and then. I heard about a group of exploration geologists who wanted to investigate a certain asteroid. They found a sponsor but that sponsor had a special request, change the shape of the asteroid into the distinct shape of the soft drink bottle the company is known for. It’s a crazy world…
Mike Fabio says: 
JamesD says: