The Dark Side of the Moon 2
Our shuttle touched down on the lunar surface on a landing platform which had been designed by engineering teams, for the purpose of making shuttle lift-offs from the moon’s surface easier, since there were actually very few level areas on which to actually set down a space-faring vessel.
Permit me to comment at this point that if we were still using vehicles which required to scoot for a bit to gain enough energy to launch off the ground, I dare say there would have been no space for such a thing on the moon’s surface, with all its craters, hillocks and gullies.
Now, having landed, we deployed the PC-Rover, a rugged, hovering vehicle, although it could switch between flying and deploying as a more terrestrial six-wheeled vehicle, much like an antique army jeep, but a lot more upgraded and air-tight.
There were just five of us on the mission, so there was enough space in the Rover. I was the driver, point-man and general back-up, in case anyone needed any extra hands.
As we packed all our gear and loaded them into the Rover, I remember thinking about how this journey would make history. No human had actually been on the dark side of the moon; we’d just been using surveillance robots, but even those have failings.
As we sailed off the shuttle’s boarding ramp in the Rover, we could see, in the distance, where the light of the sun stopped, creating a shadow which stretched over half of the moon’s surface permanently. People had often speculated a lot of ridiculous things about the dark side of the moon. I felt honoured to be one of those who would bring its secrets to light, in more ways than one.
We had travelled for about an hour, without any particularly surprising events. Although the findings were expected, they were not all together boring or unpleasant. A huge rock, revealed to be fragments of a meteor, promised some kilotons of cobalt.
There was an iron geode in a huge crack over which we flew. Another hillock was almost completely made of nickel. The particular area of the moon over which we traversed was rich in a number of useful metallic elements.
The moon seemed to be quite the potential mining station the earth had always needed. Everything was going according to just how the specialists at home predicted…
…then the mineral scanner began to read very wrong signals.
To be continued...
Thanks for coming!
That little boy,