The airline TWA is the first to submit a request to the American aviation authorities to operate a flight line to the moon, when this becomes possible. So reported on July 28, 1969, Haaretz aviation affairs reporter
The airline TWA is the first to submit a request to the American aviation authorities to operate a flight line to the moon, when this becomes possible. So reported on July 28, 1969 Sofer Haaretz for Aviation Affairs (at that time they did not use to sign the news). According to the same news, the number of people interested in the flight has reached about 5,000 since the registration began in December 1968. The company's management notes that, although there is no possibility of a civilian flight to the moon in the near future, after the impressive scientific and technological achievement of the Apollo 11 launch, it was clarified that the request for flight rights to the moon is no longer within the scope An imaginary idea.
Since then, not only were there no private flights, the regular scientific flights to the moon also stopped after seven flights (including Apollo 13 which did not land on the moon due to a malfunction). It turns out that Apollo 17 was not supposed to be the last flight, and that at least seven more flights were planned until the early eighties, during which From which the astronauts were supposed to stay about two months on the lunar surface.
The fact that it was not the science that was at the top of the minds of the American government that funded the Previct, but the prestige, is what caused it to stop. Firstly for budget reasons, secondly - in the meantime there was a compromise between the powers and one of the Apollo spaceships that remained in the Sabo warehouse was converted into a spaceship in orbit around the Earth for a meeting with a Russian Soyuz spaceship.
The moon was left to its own devices and since Apollo 17 on December 14, 1972, no human foot has set foot on the moon, and in fact no human has passed the height of 600 kilometers above the earth - the highest height reached by the space shuttles. For 22 years, there was no scientific investigation of the moon, and only in 1994 was an experimental spacecraft sent to it - Clementine, which practiced scanning the moon, in preparation for a future model of spy satellites designed to scan the Earth. So by chance she discovered the ice pack near the South Pole. A later spacecraft - the Lunar Prospector was sent only last year.
Later in 1999, Japan will launch the LUNAR-A spacecraft to the moon, defined as a mission to orbit and penetrate the lunar surface. The scientific goal of LUNAR-A is to photograph the surface of the moon, and monitor the moon's vibrations, measure the temperature properties in the area below the surface of the moon and the heat currents there, as well as study the internal structure of the moon's core. For this purpose, the spacecraft will carry a mapping camera and two landers that will contain instruments for digging in the lunar soil. These devices are seismometers and devices for measuring heat currents.
In addition, the Japanese are planning a follow-up project for 2003
Nicknamed SELENE. All of these, as mentioned, are unmanned spacecraft. In an interview with "Popular Science", Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, explains that "it's as if Kennedy reached into the 21st century, hijacked a decade of time, snuck it into the sixties and seventies and called it Apollo. We reached the moon, and then we returned home." According to him, he did not think that man would stay at home, "we had all the momentum to go on our way to Mars within a decade".
By the way, in the late eighties, President Bush tried to revive the project and announced that we would return to the moon to stay there, and that we would fly a manned spacecraft to Mars. President Clinton says nothing, but acts quietly, when he did not interfere with NASA launching small spacecraft at the rate of two spacecraft per cycle (one every two years when Mars and Earth are approaching) to study all aspects related to a manned landing.
