Heading for the Moon 2022.

I took this photo at 15.30 hours, whilst I was waiting for the man to service our gas boiler.

I well remember all the excitement of watching the moon landing in 1969, on a black and white TV screen. It’s amazing that since the ending of the Apollo missions manned missions ceased for 50 years.

This year is going to see a return to the moon, although no manned landings. The inaugural flight of NAS’s heavy-lift rocket (SLS) in February will put the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle (which includes a European built capsule) in a six day orbit around the moon.

Then in March CAPSTONE heads to the moon from New Zealand. This is a pathfinder for the crewed Lunar Gateway platform, using a Rocket Lab electron rocket. The first commercial landings on the moon will commence in April with Intuitive Machine’s Nova C lander (that company returns in December).

Mid 2022 another company, Astrobotics, will undertake the Peregrine Mission One. It will launch on another company’s rocket (United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan-Centaur rocket).

And then there are other countries launching moon missions this year - Japan, India, Russia, the UAE (partnered by a Japanese company), South Korea, and rather unbelievably the Ukrainian based LRS launching from Norway. China must be in the mix somewhere too, although it seems to be focussed this year on the Tiangong space station and Mars.

It’s getting confusingly busy up there.