Moon Travel Guide

The Moon is the Earth’s only natural satellite, roughly 385,000 kilometers away. It is roughly the size of Continent of Africa in terms of surface area. As of today scientist have not found any sign of life on the moon. Not even a ‘dead’ bacteria.

The Moon’s gravitational influence produces the body tides, ocean tides, and the slight lengthening of the day. The current distance of the Moon’s orbit is over thirty diameters of Earth. Its size in the sky is almost the same as the size of the Sun.

Photo: Blood Moon / The Art of Travel Partners

This fact results in the Moon covering the Sun nearly precisely in a total solar eclipse.

Photo: Total Solar Eclipse / NASA (CC0)

Moon Travel

If you’re content with just taking a closer look, Space Adventures, and the Russian Space Agency has come with an idea of a tourist flight around the moon for approximately 100 million dollars. However, if you cannot get into space, you can still see the Moon from the Earth.

Photo: The Art of Travel Partners

Some of the activities and sightseeing options on the moon are rock collecting, which is the most obvious hobby, and it’s easy to do since the Moon is one giant rock. Plant your nation’s flag on the lunar surface. You can write your name on the moon’s cold rocky surface.

Be sure to take plenty of photographs to show to the folks back home. The moonwalk could be tricky in a space-suit, but there is no better place to do it.

Make sure to use a specifical camera, which you can operate wearing bulky gloves. They are usually a part of the space-suit.

Photo: NASA (CC0)

Human Visit To Moon

The Soviet Union’s Luna program launched the first uncrewed spacecraft, which reached the Moon in 1959.

Photo: The Art of Travel Partners

The United States‘ NASA Apollo program, on the other hand, achieved only crewed missions, starting from the first crewed lunar orbiting mission of Apollo 8 in 1968, and continuing with six crewed lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11.

In fact, the Moon has had no human visitors since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.

But this is going to change soon now starting with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dear Moon project set to launch in 2023.

Upcoming Moon Missions

There are several upcoming and future moon missions scheduled or proposed by various nations or organizations. Some of them are crewed whereas many are robotic.

Related: Space Travel

We’ll highlight the crewed missions to moon below. If you hear any news of a new mission that we are missing, please comment below or email us through our Contact page.

• NASA – EM-2 mission currently scheduled for June 2022 launch to test the Orion spacecraft on a free-return trajectory around the Moon
• SpaceX – DearMoon mission currently scheduled for 2023 as a Space tourism and art project
• NASA – EM-3 mission currently scheduled for 2024 to deliver European System Providing Refuelling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications, the U.S. Utilization Module, and an airlock to the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.
• Blue Origin – the manned Moon mission by Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, currently scheduled for some9mte in 2020s

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August 22, 2016 12:00 am Published by Salil Jha 1 Comment