This year's September 27 marks three important lunar events -- a supermoon, a total lunar eclipse and Asia's Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival.
CNN: Best way to see supermoon? On a Chinese moon-viewing flight
Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt -- a geologist at the time, and the only scientist to make the lunar journey -- served a term as U.S. senator from New Mexico, but was defeated in a run for re-election in 1982.
Founder Michael Laine has resurrected the company and taken to Kickstarter to drum up interest (as well as a little cash) in his latest project -- a lunar elevator.
ENGADGET: Liftport turns to Kickstarter for space elevator experiment (video)
He plays Sam, an astronaut who is nearing the end of a three-year stint on the lunar surface, where he manages the mining of Helium-3, a precious substance that will save the planet Earth.
That will be followed by deployment of an unmanned lunar orbiter mission along with a nuclear-powered landing vehicle to support lunar rover delivery and sample return operations.
The Waxing Gibbous Moon - the lunar phase between first quarter Moon and a full Moon - will be approximately one degree south of Jupiter appearing to be only a pen width apart.
ENGADGET: PSA: Slooh's Space Camera broadcasting Moon / Jupiter conjunction right now
Incentive backed challenges attract "maverick thinkers who challenge normal assumptions" and make heroes of the teams who compete in these paradigm-changing efforts to solve significant social problems like building the ultimate fuel-efficient car or developing a lunar landing vehicle.
Out there in the desolate, lunar like desert of northern Chile is a mineral-rich ore called caliche -- once known as white gold.
"It's all fallen apart, " Aldrin says, talking about what may prove a half-century gap between American lunar landings.
The prize will go to the first person to come up with a way of quickly extracting an adequate amount of oxygen from simulated lunar regolith (volcanic ash is being used as a stand-in).
The consortium tested the practicalities of using a printer on the Moon by setting up a D-shape 3D printer, which are used to print very large house-sized structures, in a vacuum chamber with simulated lunar material.
After a month of fly-bys over the south pole, Lunar Prospector should be able to confirm the presence or absence of water once and for all.
It was specifically designed to crash-land on the Moon after capturing a series of images of the lunar surface on its approach.
The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration presents a significant upgrade in existing data communications used in space -- with an estimated increase of six times the throughput of the current best radio system.
In addition to working towards building a Lunar space elevator, LiftPort also has its eyes on more down-to-Earth concerns, suggesting that its technology could also be deployed during emergency situations to help provide camera support to locate victims so they can be found and aided by responders.
FORBES: Liftport Is Kickstarting A Space Elevator - For The Moon
Armadillo came close to winning the X Prize Foundation's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge last year by flying an alcohol-fueled rocket 150 feet in the air to a landing pad 300 feet away.
Northrop Grumman (nyse: NOC - news - people ) Lunar Lander Challenge last year by flying an alcohol-fueled rocket 150 feet in the air to a landing pad 300 feet away.
In 1986, a luxury resort on a lunar finger of land in Oman or a luxury cruiser plying the headwaters of the Amazon was as far-fetched as the notion that there was a New World out there must have seemed to contemporaries of Columbus.
Nasa scientists will be hugely disappointed by this latest failure as a successful mission would have given them the first ever close-up images of the mysterious lunar surface.
However, as with the European Lunar Lander project I wrote about in my last posting, EPS-SG is having to compete for funds alongside a wide range of very worthy projects.
The "Mona Lisa" experiment was transmitted at a slow data rate of about 300 bits per second, but the "pathfinding achievement sets the stage for ... high data rate laser-communication demonstrations that will be a central feature of NASA's next moon mission, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, " said Goddard's Richard Vondrak, the orbiter's deputy project scientist.
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