SHACKLETON CRATER

One popular sci-fi TV series at the moment is For All Mankind, which chronicles a fascinating and thrilling alternative history of the US space program. We all know that in real life Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first astronauts on the Moon, landing their Apollo 11 Lunar Module ‘Eagle’ in the Sea of Tranquillity. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the alternate history of , the Soviets beat the US to the Moon – Alexei Leonov takes that first small step instead of Armstrong, quickly followed by a female cosmonaut, and it all follows on from there as the Space Race goes into top gear. By the mid-1970s there have been 25 Apollo missions, carrying both male and female crews, and both superpowers have small military outposts on the Moon, built on the rim of a crater down at the Moon’s south pole called Shackleton. Why there? Because its shadowy depths, never illuminated by the Sun, contain priceless deposits of ice that can be processed to make fuel and water, allowing lunar settlers to ‘live off the land’ instead of lugging those resources up from Earth.