Lavinia reviewed The Moon by Oliver Morton
Review of 'The Moon' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Following Yuri Gagarin’ s successful orbit mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced to the American nation a goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. Apollo project was the largest non-military technological endeavour ever undertaken by the United States and its goals, besides achieving pre-eminence in space for the United States, were to carrying out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon and developing man’s capability to work in the lunar environment.
In less than a decade, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission beamed back to earth the first television footage of American astronauts on the moon. It was a groundbreaking moment in humanity’s history. Six Apollo missions followed the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing. The last time humans touched the Moon was on December 1972, with the Apollo 17 mission. …
Following Yuri Gagarin’ s successful orbit mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced to the American nation a goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. Apollo project was the largest non-military technological endeavour ever undertaken by the United States and its goals, besides achieving pre-eminence in space for the United States, were to carrying out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon and developing man’s capability to work in the lunar environment.
In less than a decade, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission beamed back to earth the first television footage of American astronauts on the moon. It was a groundbreaking moment in humanity’s history. Six Apollo missions followed the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing. The last time humans touched the Moon was on December 1972, with the Apollo 17 mission. This was not only the final Moon landing, but the last time humans left low Earth orbit. It was 47 years ago.
But something is going to happen again, says Oliver Morton. “The Return to the Moon is coming, and it will be undertaken by men and women from many other places, and with more agendas, than were in the American vanguard of 50 years ago.”
I am not really sure what I expected when I started reading The Moon: A History for the Future but I certainly didn’t expect art and poetry and science-fiction. The Moon is a fascinating, informative and wide-ranging book.
Oliver Morton explores the Moon’s orbit, appearance and surface, and how the Moon affects the flow of the ocean tides, he delves into the history, to the Cold War space race, and he examines the possibility of a human colony on the moon- in one of these networks of caves where astronauts would be safe from radiation, micro-meteorites, and the Moon’s extreme temperatures perhaps-in the not-too-distant future. He discusses the attempts of private enterprises to reach the Moon and reopen the lunar frontier, using it as a stepping stone to other destinations such as Mars. He also captures the Moon’s place in science-fiction, Robert Heinlein’s in particular, and the technological, social and political challenges faced by a future Luna colony.
I thoroughly enjoyed the references on Robert Heinlein’s political speculations about Lunar colonies. Heinlein was one of the founding greats of the genera, but his vision about societies is deeply patriarchal. As they were written in the 1950s it is not surprising that females barely exist in these stories. Heinlein’s Moon is a man’s world. We, women, have still many obstacles to overcome but I think we can safely say that if we were to build a Moon colony in the next decade or so, women will be there too, and they will have an important role to play.
