Alt. Eagle June 5, 2008
Posted by Nick Azer in : Altair, Apollo, Artemis , trackback
The Eagles are coming, the Eagles are coming!
-Bilbo Baggins, “The Hobbit”
The successor to the Apollo missions’ Eagle lander is the above: the Altair lander (christened as such last December). It’s named after the twelfth-brightest star in the sky, a star which is within the Aquila (‘Eagle’ in Latin) system.
First going into use in missions around 2019 (that’s only 11 years, folks), the Altair features neat little additions (compared to the Apollo modules) such as an airlock and a ‘food warmer‘ (woot for microwaves and their rough equivalents).
Fun fact: early rumors that the lander would be called Artemis (twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology) turned out to be false; though I’ll say, that’s an awfully cool name, and should by all means be used somewhere else (perhaps in exploration, as Artemis was the goddess of hills and forests) :)
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