If all goes as planned, a privately built spacecraft will land on the moon early Sunday March 2.
It’s the first in a series of exciting robotic missions to the moon in 2025, setting the stage for people to return to the moon for the first time since the first expeditions landed more than half a century ago.
The robotic lander, dubbed Blue Ghost, was created by Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company, and has been in orbit around the moon for about two weeks, preparing for its daring descent.
If only Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, L. Neil Smith, James Hogan, Michael Flynn, Vernor Vinge and other visionary Prometheus-winning authors could have lived to celebrate it!
According to an NBC News story, a successful landing will be a feat that only one other company has accomplished in spaceflight history.
Intuitive Machines, another Texas-based company, made history in February 2024 when its Odysseus lander achieved a nail-biting touchdown near the moon’s south pole – considered a key area to newly explore because of its potentially salvageable water ice.
It seems that such once-historic events soon enough will begin to seem routine – itself a sign of great progress in the decades since lunar missions and other rocket launches used to automatically be front-page news.
Intuitive Machines recently launched a second lander into space, with its targeted moon landing expected around March 6.
Another private Japanese company has launched a lander and tiny rover to the moon on the same rocket as Blue Ghost, but has been taking a longer and less energy-intensive path and isn’t expected to land on the lunar surface until late May or early June, according to the NBC story.
During its planned two weeks gathering data on the lunar surface, Blue Ghost will conduct a variety of probes, tests and experiments designed to further our understanding of the moon and enhance future manned missions.
According to the NBC story, the spacecraft’s 10 science instruments will probe the moon’s depths of up to 700 miles, sample lunar soil, study how much lunar dust sticks to different materials, study how space weather interacts with Earth’s magnetic field and use cameras to snap X-ray images looking back at Earth and take detailed photos of the lander as it descends to the lunar surface in order to aid future moon missions.
From Heinlein’s The Moon is a Marsh Mistress and Anderson’s Trader to the Stars to last year’s Best Novel winner, Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, many science fiction novels have envisioned this progress.
Among the many other Prometheus-winning authors who envisioned this future are Victor Koman (Kings of the High Frontier, the 1997 Best Novel winner and perhaps the Prometheus winner that most centrally depicts the efficacy of space development through private efforts via the free market) and Travis Corcoran (The Powers of the Earth and its direct sequel Causes of Separation, respectively the 2018 and 2019 Best Novel winners.)
Such an exciting, emerging reality, though, doesn’t mean that any of their Prometheus-winning novels are no longer relevant or no longer worth reading.
Even if some of the specific details of the rocket ships and moon landings they imagined didn’t end up working out that way in reality, their absorbing and optimistic stories, characters and empowering individualist and libertarian themes can continue to enthrall readers for generations to come.
ABOUT THE LFS AND PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters. We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international|magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
Optimistic stories about the near-future of space travel are priceless, especially when paired with individualist ideals. Such as those found in the literary works of Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. As is pointed out in this blog post.
For example, I was aware of Blue Ghost’s landing. But I did not previously understand another Texas based company (Intuitive Machines) had also landed on the moon earlier this year. We do indeed live in epic times.