Pick of the Issue this week is Rivka Galchen’s absorbing “The Eighth Continent,” a report on the race to develop the moon. Galchen talks with a number of fascinating people, including Jack Burns, director of the Network for Exploration and Space Science, at the University of Colorado Boulder; George Sowers, professor of space resources at the Colorado School of Mines; Alain Berinstain, vice-president of global development at the lunar-exploration company Moon Express; and Zou Xiaoduan, who works for the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson.
She visits the Sommers-Bausch Observatory, in Boulder; Masten Space Systems at the Mojave Air and Space Port, in California; the Center for Space Resources’ laboratory, in Golden, Colorado; and the exploration-technology division of Honeybee Robotics, in Pasadena.
My favourite passage in “The Eighth Continent” is Galchen’s description of a Masten rocket taking off:
One of the newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two golden balloons mounted on a metal skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out as the Xodiac launches straight up; at its apex, it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns, seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at that moment, the rocket seems sentient, intentional.
That “it has the ability to tilt and float down at an angle, as casually as a leaf” is wonderful. The whole piece is wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely.
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