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Sorry, a lunar Dyson is not a thing

Late last night, NZ time, a privately operated moon mission touched down on the surface of the moon.

Woohoo!

The Blue Ghost lunar lander nailed its arrival and it has been reported that the craft is alive, well and even sitting upright, an achievement no other private or state-funded mission has been able to achieve for quite some time.

Although Blue Ghost has won the race back to our moon, other contestants are on the way as I type.

The next attempted landing will take place next week in fact with a craft made and operated by Intuitive Machines scheduled to touch down on Thursday (US-time).

What does it tell us when privately funded and operated missions now appear to be capable of safely reaching the moon and landing -- while the US-funded SpaceX Starship can't even safely carry a banana to the Indian Ocean in a sub-orbital flight after billions of dollars of taxpayer aid?

Firefly, the operators of the Blue Ghost, charged NASA just over $140 million to supply and deliver 10 science experiments to the lunar surface using its craft. Sounds like fantastic value to me.

There is one thing I don't quite understand however...

A report published by the Associated Press states:

Excuse me?

I'm pretty sure that sci-savvy Aardvark readers will spot the problem here.

The moon has no atmosphere -- its surface is already exposed to the vacuum of space.

You can't create suction in a vacuum -- right?

Okay to be fair, I guess they're going to provide a blast of compressed gas and then try to draw that gas and the surface material it disturbs, into a container using a pump of some kind -- but how do you compete with the vacuum of space?

Perhaps it's not for us "regular folk" to know how this is done and maybe the media has been given a dumbed-down explanation in the hope that nobody spots the obvious.

Whatever the details may be, why do I feel like this is such a great achievement -- especially when you remember that well over half a century ago, actual humans were landing on the moon with what became monotonous regularity. Given the pace that our tech has advanced over the subsiquent 50 years, surely landing a probe on the moon's surface ought not be such a big deal.

Carpe Diem folks!

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