Star Struck

Tilt!

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Planets, Sky Phenomena, Solar System

Whenever I’ve had the privilege of showing a telescopic view of Saturn to someone who has never seen it before, the almost inevitable response is disbelief. “Is that real?” Especially if its beautiful rings are highly tilted, the view is among the most beautiful objects in our solar system. This is an image I took a few years ago at the Belk Observatory, on the grounds of the Claytor Nature Center in Bedford County, Virginia.

Image by Neal Sumerlin

On September 21st of this year, Saturn will reach opposition. For a planet farther from the Sun than Earth, this is when it lies opposite the Sun in our skies, highest in the sky at midnight. It is the best time to observe the planet, as it is in the sky all night.

https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/max_width_1440/public/opposition.JPG?itok=i4utPh-_

But this year, the rings will be barely visible, almost edge on as we see them. This is what Saturn will look like—granted, this clear and detailed only through a very large telescope—on the night of September 21st.

Image from Starry Night planetarium software

And this is a composite view of Saturn showing the planet’s changing orientation from 2004 to 2015.

https://earthsky.org/upl/2021/09/saturn2004to2015_peach_lg.jpg

What’s happening? Is Saturn rocking back and forth? As with many visual observations, it’s a matter of perspective.

The rings circle Saturn’s equator. But like the Earth’s axis, Saturn’s axis around which it rotates is tilted relative to its orbit around the Sun.

https://cdn4.vectorstock.com/i/1000×1000/62/18/planet-saturn-vector-1856218.jpg

From a vantage point outside our solar system, that tilt doesn’t change. But from the Earth, we view the planet alternately from “above”, looking down on the planet’s northern hemisphere, and from “below”, looking up at its southern hemisphere.

https://mydarksky.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/changing-aspect-saturn-rings_sm.jpg

Mark your calendars for April 2032! That is when Saturn’s southern hemisphere is at its greatest tilt toward the Sun, and we will see the rings in all their glory.

Image from Starry Night planetarium software

 

Mirror, Mirror

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Observatory and Telescopes

The first telescopes, like the ones Galileo used to discover the moons of Jupiter and craters on the moon, were crude by today’s standards. Nonetheless, they were gateways to a new understanding of our place in the cosmos.

https://collections.rmg.co.uk/media/409/320/f3729.jpg

All telescopes are what I like to describe as light funnels. Their function is to gather more light than can naturally pass through your eye’s pupil, with its 6 to 7 millimeter diameter, and to narrow its beams to pass through that narrow opening. Even though modern telescopes focus that light on cameras rather than human eyes, the principle is the same.

Galileo’s telescope was a refractor. It used lenses that gathered, then bent light. At the end to which an observer put their eye, another lens focused and magnified the image.

https://www.telescopenerd.com/wp-content/uploads/refracting-telescope-diagram-1.jpg

The other means by which light can be manipulated for astronomical uses is with a curved mirror. Reflecting telescopes have some important advantages over refractors.

• Lenses have to be flawless since light must pass through them unimpeded. What is behind the reflecting surface of a mirror, however, does not affect the light path.
• No glass is 100% transparent; the thicker the lens, the more light is lost.
• Both sides of a lens must be ground and polished to a smooth surface. Only one side of a mirror requires this.
• Lenses are much thicker and heavier than mirrors of the same aperture.
• Lenses bend light of different wavelengths (and therefore different colors) by different amounts. This chromatic aberration creates false colors in objects we are viewing.

While this can be compensated for with multiple lens combinations, it can never be entirely eliminated. Mirrors don’t suffer from this limitation, as they can reflect light of different wavelengths to the same point.

One such reflecting telescope design is shown below.

https://supernova.eso.org/static/archives/exhibitionimages/screen/05-new.jpg

What is the reflecting surface?

In the early days of reflecting telescopes, mirrors were made of speculum metal, a mixture of around two-thirds copper and one-third tin, making a white alloy that can be polished to make a highly reflective surface. These were eventually superseded by mirrors coated with silver. Silver is highly reflective, but of course it is expensive. Modern mirrors are generally coated with aluminum.

The mirror in your bathroom, in front of which you shave or dry your hair, is a second surface mirror. The aluminum reflective surface is on the back of the mirror and is protected by an overcoat of paint. You can see this by placing the point of a pencil on the glass and noting that there is a noticeable gap between the reflected image and the actual object due to the thickness of the glass.

Picture by Neal Sumerlin

But there is also a faint image of the pencil with no gap: a reflection from the front surface of the glass.

Telescopes use front surface mirrors, and the means by which a thin coating of aluminum (typically 100 nanometers thick) is place on the mirror is by vacuum deposition.

https://www.findlight.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/EVacDepo.gif

The aluminum is overcoated by silicon dioxide that protects the underlying metal layer from oxidation and physical damage like scratches.

The Margaret Gilbert Telescope at the Belk Observatory is nearing its 18th birthday—almost old enough to vote! We are getting ready to have its coating removed and replaced, and will have to take it elsewhere to get that done. World-class observatories have their facilities on site!

https://storage.noirlab.edu/media/archives/images/screen/rubin-telescope-cutaway-labels-1.jpg\

We’re not quite that well-equipped.

 

Strange Visitor from Another Star

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Sky Phenomena

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s 3I/ATLAS, the third known object to visit our solar system from outside it. The “3” in the name indicates that it is the third such object, the “I” that it is interstellar, and the “ATLAS” that it was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile. Although that telescope was designed to detect objects that might impact the Earth, there is no danger that 3I/ATLAS will do so.

How do we know it’s interstellar?

After its discovery on July 1, 2025, telescopes all over the world were able to track it and to plot its trajectory. Data taken before the discovery confirmed that it was in fact interstellar.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Comet_3I-ATLAS.gif

An object from within the solar system will have a closed trajectory—an orbit. Halley’s Comet for example, which last passed near the Earth in 1986, will reappear in 2061 and every 76 years or so thereafter.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Halley%27s_Comet_animation.gif/250px-Halley%27s_Comet_animation.gif

But interstellar objects pass through the solar system and never come back. Here are some perspectives on the path of 3I/ATLAS.

Image from https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=C%2F2025%20N1&view=VOP

Image from https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=C%2F2025%20N1&view=VOP

As you can see, it comes nowhere near the Earth. That’s a good thing, as the preliminary (and very uncertain) observations peg its size as anywhere between 0.8 to 24 kilometers (0.5 to 14.9 miles). Even that smaller size would do significant damage were it to intercept our planet.

What sort of object is it?

It’s a comet, an object sometimes characterized as a dirty snowball. It has an active nucleus with a surrounding cloud—a coma–of reflective dust and a small tail.

https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/t_share/MjA1ODMzNDEyODUzMDQ4OTUy/rocks-in-the-solar-system-comet.jpg

Why is it of interest?

Since it comes from another star system, its chemical makeup could tell us something about that star. Of the two previous interstellar visitors, 1I/ʻOumuamua’s exact nature is still in dispute–asteroid (rocky) or comet (icy). Some fanciful speculations by people who should know better called  1I/ʻOumuamua an alien artifact. Occam’s Razor, an important principle of critical thinking, tells us that there are simpler and likely better explanations. 2I/Borisov was definitely a comet. Its composition was uncommon but not unseen in solar system comets.

The LSST (Large Survey of Space and Time) Camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin a ten year “movie” of the entire sky visible from its location in Chile later this year. It will surely discover millions of small solar system objects. It will just as surely find some more visitors from the stars beyond our own.

 

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More Rocket Science

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Rocket Science

Take a look at these two images, both the tail end of the first stage of a really big rocket. One is from almost sixty years ago. The other is contemporary. Both have a lot of rocket engines designed to work together. Can you tell which is which?

https://i.sstatic.net/45zNk.jpg

https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20230208raptors.jpg

OK, the graininess of that first image may have given it away. Those 30 engines are on the first stage of the N-1 rocket, the rocket that the Soviet Union hoped would take their cosmonauts to the moon. As we all know, the American moon rocket, the Saturn V, worked spectacularly. The second image is of the SpaceX Super Heavy booster, the first stage of the Starship launch vehicle. It has 33 rocket engines.

The N-1 rocket flew four times between 1969 and 1972, none successfully. The record for the Super Heavy is mixed, but it has scored some notable successes in itself, independent of the success of the Starship second stage.

Why did the N-1 fail and the Saturn V succeed?

There were two ways to build a rocket big enough to take men to the moon in the late 1960s, each with its own problem. You could build really big engines and cluster a few of them together in the first stage, the one with the hard job of lifting the entire vehicle from the launch pad. This was the approach taken with the successful Saturn V. Five enormous engines powered its first stage.

https://www.clarionledger.com/gcdn/-mm-/92a9acee110601543bc673fc67b15afad0432a11/c=0-62-1277-783/local/-/media/2016/06/17/JacksonMS/JacksonMS/636017701705752423-saturn-rocket-stage-2.jpg?width=660&height=373&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp

The problem with such huge engines is something called combustion instability. In such a large engine, with massive amounts of fuel and oxidizer mixing and igniting, turbulence and pressure variations could multiply and blow the engine apart. The solution lay in the design of the engine’s injector plate. A plate sat at the top of each F-1 engine. Holes across the plate’s surface forced the engine’s propellants (liquid oxygen and kerosene) into the combustion chamber. The instability was solved by the addition of baffles (dividers) across the injector plate’s surface.

http://heroicrelics.org/info/f-1/f-1-injector/f-1-engine-injector.jpg

Static testing (firing the engines on the ground) gave NASA the confidence to fly the rocket. The Saturn V flew 13 times between 1967 and 1973, all successfully.

The other approach is to use a smaller rocket engine and cluster a lot of them. That was the Soviet approach. In the rush to get to the moon first, the Soviets did not run static tests. The problems were not so much with the engine itself; in many ways it was a very efficient design. Without diving too deep into the details of each failure, we can say that the coordination and control of thirty engines was just too much to manage.

But Starship has 33 engines! Why does it work?

Well, it hasn’t always. But it hasn’t always failed, either, as seen in this image of all 33 engines firing.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ZW6aFHbMYgrgQ6fe4Emnfn-1200-80.jpg

The shortest answer to the posed question is 21st century computer control versus that available in the late 1960s.

The Saturn V was a marvel, but that first stage used brute force. SpaceX’s Super Heavy Booster, if it can ever get past the testing stage, really is an elegant and efficient rocket.

It’s Not Rocket Science

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Uncategorized

The basics of rocket science really are pretty simple. Send a lot of hot gas out one end of a rocket, and it will go in the opposite direction. You know what’s hard? Orbital mechanics, maneuvering a spacecraft to rendezvous with something else. Or at the very least, it’s counterintuitive.

On June 3rd in 1965, the Gemini 4 mission was launched, with Jim McDivitt and Ed White as the passengers. The mission is best remembered for White’s spacewalk, when he opened the hatch and floated free, attached to his craft only by a tether.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/178429main_image_feature_838_ys_full-a.jpg

Before that however, McDivitt was instructed to rendezvous with the spent second stage of his Titan booster, trailing behind him in orbit. Being able to find and meet up with another object in space was crucial to the success of the moon missions, where the two astronauts in the lunar module would have to catch the command module for their ride home. McDivitt did what seemed quite natural to an experienced pilot. He turned his capsule around, pointed it at the rocket stage, and fired his thrusters.

https://live.staticflickr.com/5814/22836085892_9af3aec7eb_b.jpg

What happened? Not what he expected! He found himself moving away and downward.

NASA had not yet figured out quite how things worked in orbit. Counterintuitively, you have to slow down in order to speed up. And doing so lowers your altitude.
Something orbiting close to the Earth, where its gravity is stronger, has to move fast to stay in orbit. The International Space Station orbits at 17,160 miles per hour, 250 miles high. Communication satellites that appear stationary from the ground orbit 22,236 miles high, at 6,867 mph. And when the moon is at its average distance of 239,000 miles, it is moving at the leisurely pace of 2,258 mph.

Of course this problem was solved, and any time astronauts launch to the ISS, they apply the lessons learned. What would have worked for McDivitt?
With an object behind him, he would need to increase his speed by firing his thrusters. This would move him into a higher orbit, where he would move more slowly. This would allow that Titan second stage, moving faster in a lower orbit, to catch up. Eventually the Gemini spacecraft would be behind the rocket stage. A series of maneuvers that allowed him to match orbits would let him rendezvous.

This excellent animation will tell you all about it!

Location, Location, Location

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Rocket Science, Spacecraft

Why does SpaceX launch its gigantic Starship from as far south as you can get in Texas?

Google Maps Image

Is it because Elon Musk likes lower taxes and a looser regulatory environment than he might find in other states? Probably. But there are very good technical reasons why orbital launch facilities are generally situated close to the equator. American rockets lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, at 28.6 degrees north latitude, while the SpaceX facility is just south of 26 degrees north. The European Space Agency launches from French Guiana, about 5 degrees north of the equator.

Google Earth Image

All of these face bodies of water to their east, the Atlantic Ocean for Florida and French Guiana, and the Gulf of Mexico for Texas.

All of these locations take advantage of the Earth’s rotation to give them a little more velocity than they would have from a stationary launch pad. And the closer you are to the equator, the faster that speed.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUMkxdyym4NkDDYw3LGn0vYJCSjqVDD4-OAoxbeA4GRBwwqQzt8n5Tu5XX-mL0Au0NZiPzmC13tcKNl_tNyUMpZeh8gDtW4LQ0puwLxlvpjayG17XOyqhQslgpfBM6ZPqljOPg0neeJRiq/s1600/earth.jpg

Could you launch from farther north or south? Sure, you could. The Russian launch facility for everything from Sputnik to Yuri Gagarin to today’s trips to the International Space Station—they all start from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 46 degrees north. But a look at the geography of the old Soviet Union tells you there really wasn’t a better option. It requires a bit more energy than from a more southerly location, but it’s not a huge problem.

Could you launch aiming west, against the Earth’s rotation? Again, yes—but why would you? Instead of that rotation adding to your speed, it would subtract from it.

A big enough rocket can launch you into any orbit desired. But the most energy-efficient low earth orbit moves from west to east, close to the equator.

Where Does Space Begin?

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in human spaceflight, Spacecraft

If you are old enough, like me, to remember when riding a rocket into space was something no one had ever done, you may be joining me in some mix of amusement, mild disdain, and (let’s face it) jealousy at all the millionaires and celebrities, and a few regular folks, who get to do so.

As of this writing, Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard rocket is scheduled to carry six persons on an 11-minute ride into space in a couple of days from now. They will reach a peak altitude of around 66 miles (106 kilometers) and experience “a few” (probably about three) minutes of weightlessness.

https://everydayastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/blue-origin-first-human-flight-l0-new-shepard-launch.jpg

The best thing about this rocket is its name. Alan Shepard was the first American in space, and his flight, like this one, was suborbital—up and down. Shepard’s peak altitude, however, was 116 miles, much higher than his namesake rocket.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Alan_Shepard_pouso.jpg

So are these space tourists actually going to space? Is Katy Perry an astronaut?

There are several rather arbitrary definitions of how far above the surface you have to rise to be in space. There is no abrupt boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space; the air gradually gets thinner as you ascend. Even the International Space Station experiences some atmospheric drag at 400 kilometers (250 miles) up, and has to be periodically boosted higher.

The U.S. Armed Forces definition of an astronaut is a person who has flown higher than 50 miles (80 km) above mean sea level. Several X-15 rocket plane pilots flew above this height in the 1960s.

The Kármán line is probably the most widely accepted definition. It lies at 100 km (62 miles), and the New Shepard spacecraft takes you just barely above that.

As a practical matter, a satellite in orbit can’t maintain that orbit if it is too low, where the atmosphere will slow it and bring it back to Earth. That limit is roughly 150 kilometers (93 miles).

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHXkf4WWIAAeIYF?format=jpg&name=large (modified by Neal Sumerlin)

Have these suborbital space tourists been to space? We’ll grant them that. Are they astronauts? Nah.

 

Twins, Siblings, and Only Children

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Stars

Many people have at least a passing interest in astronomy. It’s why, even though my graduate education is in chemistry, I’m always sure to tell new acquaintances that I taught astronomy for much of my career. Chemistry is probably more obviously relevant to them, but astronomy is more popular.

Something they may have heard somewhere along the way is that the majority of stars are binaries, two stars orbiting a common center.

https://www.iac.es/sites/default/files/styles/color/public/images/news/main-qimg-a231546b8a3369ba260078cce40d4f99-c.jpeg?itok=8XADbh6m

But this is a classic case of selection bias, where the samples chosen are not representative of the whole population. The stars that are easiest to see are ones like our Sun, or less numerous ones even larger. But the most numerous stars are smaller and dimmer than our home star. They are red dwarfs, or M-class stars. (Not to be confused with Star Trek Class M planets, Trekkers.)

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/kerbol-starsystem/images/1/19/AStar_types.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20171221083246

Stars not too dissimilar from the G-class Sun—classes F, G, and K—comprise very roughly one fourth of all stars. The big and bright O, B, and A stars—hard to miss because they are so luminous—are rather rare. M-class stars are quite common, roughly three fourths of all stars. They are just more difficult to spot unless they are nearby.

But better instruments let us do that. And surveys show that about three fourths of the abundant red dwarfs observed are single stars.

So solitary stars like our Sun are not particularly unusual. As an only child, I find this reassuring!

Theories and Observations

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in Solar System

I’m old enough to remember when the solar system was described as a fairly well-ordered place. There was the Sun, the rocky inner planets, an asteroid belt of smaller rocky objects, four large gaseous/icy planets, the since demoted Pluto, and smaller icy objects beyond the most distant currently recognized planet Neptune, from which comets originated. All of these objects were presumed to have formed in place and not to have shifted over their 4.5 billion year history.

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That ordering is still valid, but we’ve come to realize that planet formation is much more dynamic than we had imagined. Giant planets migrated from their birthplaces, scattering smaller objects and subjecting the inner planets to bombardment so intense as to give that epoch its name—Hadean. The current stable configuration of planetary orbits is not as it has always been.

Understanding how planets and smaller objects coalesce from a protoplanetary disk of gas and dust is an ongoing area of research. The observational side of this research relies on telescopic scrutiny of young stars whose planets are in the process of being born. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the largest radio telescope in the world, obtained these images of several nearby stars and their surrounding disks.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/stsci-j-p2152b-f-1807×2256-1.jpg?resize=1640,2048

The theoretical side uses increasingly powerful supercomputer simulations.

There is a superb article in the June issue of Sky & Telescope magazine by one of my favorite authors, Emily Lakdawalla, about the icy objects beyond Neptune, collectively known as Trans-Neptunian Objects, TNOs. These objects are further subdivided into categories based on their orbital characteristics, and understanding how they came to be where they are has defied attempts to duplicate those positions in simulations.

Without diving too deep into the details (if interested, I highly recommend Lakdawalla’s article), it turns out that many of these objects will be binary: two objects of roughly equal mass orbiting a common center. This artist’s depiction of the near-Earth asteroid 2017 YE5 illustrates.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hNwyVz7fT2FsHPB8ovLoPo.gif

And as these objects orbit, they may spiral ever closer, perhaps even merging to form what is called a contact binary.

When the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, it continued on to a flyby in 2019 of a smaller object later named Arrokoth.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/WQCGinFQmCvt6LjuQxTU45.jpg

These two lobes had to have come together very slowly to create this peanut-shaped object without shattering them both.

More recently, the  Lucy spacecraft obtained a close look at the asteroid Donaldjohanson  as it flew by on April 20, 2025, on its way to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.

https://assets.science.nasa.gov/dynamicimage/assets/science/missions/lucy/final_0798443319_dec.png

Another contact binary! Theories are of course constrained by observations, but observations are just that. WHY do we observe what we do? One of the wonderful things about science is that we will never run out of questions to ask and mysteries to solve.

A New Moon Race?

Posted on by nealsumerlin Posted in human spaceflight, The Moon

When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972, they all landed fairly close to the lunar equator.

https://lightsinthedark.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/apollo-landing-sites-new.jpg

The largest excursion north or south was that of the Apollo 15 mission. It landed 26 degrees north of the equator in the Hadley–Apennine region, almost to the rim of Hadley Rille, hypothesized to be a collapsed lava tube.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/AP_15_LS_1.png

The orbital mechanics of the Apollo missions made trips far from the lunar equator too expensive in terms of time and fuel. With even more powerful rockets than the Apollo-era Saturn V now available, there are more options.

The next humans to land on the moon, whether they be in American or in Chinese spacecraft, will land farther to the south than ever before, in the moon’s south polar region. In fact, NASA has already designated potential landing sites for its Artemis III mission. Two astronauts are slated to land on the moon sometime before the end of this decade. Maybe. Much depends not only on solving engineering issues, but on the uncertainties of political decisions made in Washington. China has also announced its intention to land two astronauts at the lunar south pole by 2030.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/artemis-iii-landing-region-candidates.jpg

Let’s set aside for now all the complications of this endeavor, and focus on why the lunar south pole is a target for exploration.

The moon is an airless, rocky, and dry place. Its day/night cycle is 29.53 days. It bakes at up to 121°C (250°F) for almost 15 days of sunlight, and plunges as low as -133°C (-208°F) in its 15 days of darkness.

These are temperatures at the moon’s equator. But its poles have deep craters that are permanently shadowed, that never see sunlight, and that are consequently much, much colder. The interior of Shackleton Crater at the south pole averages −183 °C (−298 °F).

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a004700/a004716/shackleton_print.jpg

Did I say the moon was dry?

Those permanently shadowed areas do have water ice in them. A NASA instrument flying on an Indian lunar orbiter detected such, and produced this map of the lunar south pole (left) and north pole (right).

https://d2pn8kiwq2w21t.cloudfront.net/original_images/imagesmoon20180820elphic20180820-16.jpg

Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). The ice is concentrated at the darkest and coldest locations, in the shadows of craters. [From https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ice-confirmed-at-the-moons-poles/]

Note that because of the different topography of the two poles, there is more ice at the south pole than the north, and it is less spread out.

The two nations with the ability to return to the moon in the next decade are the United States and China. Both have continuously inhabited space stations in orbit, assembled and currently crewed with rockets launched from their territory. The remnant of the former Soviet Union’s space program simply lacks both the will and the ability to go to the moon.

The Space Race of the 1960s took place for a lot of reasons, but it wasn’t to claim ownership of valuable and limited resources. Lunar water would be useful in making long-term habitation possible on the moon. A lunar real estate agent would remind you of the classic maxim: location, location, location! A new Moon Race could be more contentious than the USA/USSR completion of the past. There is plenty of room in low Earth orbit, and no one was claiming territory on the moon, despite the planting of the U.S. flag. This time it could be different.

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