Liftoff!

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

We’re on our way!

To all space enthusiasts, especially those who are interested in the moon, welcome! I’m celebrating the launch of my blog, appropriately enough, with a picture of a rocket launch. On June 18, 2009, NASA successfully sent its first two lunar missions of this millennium into orbit: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). (Image credit: United Launch Alliance/ Pat Corkery.)

LRO Logo in center, LCROSS just above it

It’s an exciting time to start a moon blog. Not only have the LRO and LCROSS missions gotten underway, but also the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission is still going and the Japanese Kaguya mission has just ended. We also have a big anniversary coming up: the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 manned mission to the moon. Two days after that, the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century will take place — and as you know, we wouldn’t have eclipses without the moon.

That is a sample of the topics I plan to cover in my blog. I also hope to include interviews with people who are working on moon-related projects, whether they be NASA or private, science or literature or art. Yes, I do intend this blog to be not just about lunar science. The moon plays a large role in our culture, so I don’t think that we should just stick it in a box labeled “Science” and forget about all the other things that the moon means to us. But that’s a topic, or discussion, or rant for another time!

This blog takes its name from the working title of a book that I wrote six years ago, which was published by John Wiley & Sons: The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be. It’s a figure of speech my grandfather used to employ often. If you “think so-and-so hung the moon,” that is another way of saying that you are a great admirer of said person.

Eventually, my editor and I decided that “Who Hung the Moon?” was not an appropriate title for the book. The main reason, for him, was that book titles should not be in the form of a question. This was news to me — hadn’t he ever heard of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”? My reasons were different. I was concerned that “hung the moon” might be an idiom from a specific region — the American South — and not everyone would understand it. And finally, “Who Hung the Moon?” didn’t quite say what the book was about. The title we chose, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was a much more straightforward description of the book’s contents.

Nevertheless, I still like the abandoned title. But it was actually my SO (Spousal Overunit), Kay, who suggested reviving it as the title for this blog. She did more than suggest it — she designed the whole look of this webpage around it, so that by the time she was done I couldn’t possibly say no! If you like the design, please send your compliments to her (and check out her quilting blog, www.allaboutapplique.net).

See the “About” pages if you want to read more about my background and reasons for writing this blog. But now, let’s get started!

Tags: Apollo, Chandrayaan, eclipse, Kaguya, LCROSS, LRO, NASA, spousal overunit, The Big Splat
Posted in Missions | 4 Comments »