For as little as $100 million dollars, you too can fly around the moon in a chartered Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, VA, has contracts currently pending for these private lunar circumnavigation flights. If the deal progresses it will be the first private flight of it's kind. Two passengers and a pilot will fly a 'boomerang pattern', or free return trajectory, around the moon in a slightly modified Soyuz craft. According to Space Adventures the Soyuz craft was originally designed to fly around the moon. They believe that the craft does not really need any modifications to successfully make the flight. However, the Space Adventures people want to make the windows a little larger and improve the communications system.

NASA is being directed by the US congress to continue with a project to put a robot on the moon. I wonder if this decision has anything to do with plans from China, Japan, India, et al to re-visit the moon for mapping and data gathering missions. Probably, huh?

The Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter was originally scheduled to land on the moon in 2011. It is part of the Lunar Precursor and Robotics Program that was originally planned to pre-date the installation of a moon colony.

The article contains a lot more information in ways that Congress is changing around the proposed NASA budget.

For the first time since WWII Germany is expressing an interest in an independent space project. The current German plan is to send an orbiter to the moon by 2013 to photograph the surface and create a lunar atlas. Germany also plans to send a soil sampler to the moon by 2020. The Lunar Exploration Orbiter project is being underwritten by proposed funding of 300 million Euros.

The project to map the surface of the moon sounds like the Change'I project from China. I believe that a similar project has also been proposed by Japan.

In this article from the Guardian, Harrison Schmitt talks about mobility in low gravity environments. Schmitt used a bunny hop motion, borrowed from skiing, to traverse the moon's surface during the Apollo mission. Using this method he was able to move around the surface much quicker than his crew mates.

Schmitt goes on to discuss the possibility that skiing on the moon's surface may prove to be one of the primary forms of entertainment for early settlers on the moon. He even has a location picked out to catch some slope time, the Taurus-Littrow valley. Hopefully the ski-lodge located along the ridge of that valley will be named Schmitt - although 'Hagan' has a better ring for a ski lodge.

MSNBC published a neat article outlining what is being done to design habitats for the moon colony. NASA's Constellation Program Office seems to be coordinating the effort.

The main thrust of the lunar habitat projects are inflatable dwellings. The reason for this is that the planned payload of the Orion ships are only 13,000 pounds. Space Station modules, which are apparently the only other option for lunar habitats, weigh up to 30,000 pounds.

Beyond talks with Lockheed and Boeing, NASA is talking with several other private contractors to help design and possibly build these inflatable habitats. One company is Bigelow Aerospace, who has already launched one of their inflatable habitat designs into orbit, and has a second test launch planned for April, 2007. The second company is ILC Dover. They have built a prototype for a NASA funded test in Antarctica.