Time to ship our Writers on the Moon payload to Astrobotic!
We’d designed and fabricated the MoonChip.
Sue did her best to make an archive-quality mini-book about the Writers on the Moon project.
And 125 Writers on the Moon and 8 Stowaways had submitted all their files* (we literally had last-minute files coming in right down to the wire at the final download!), including a README file for the project to inform our future anthropologist of the nature of our project and how it was giving us hope in some pretty dark days. We even were able to fit two SDcards into the stackup, giving us extra redundancy and protection against data loss.
It was time to ship!
(And not a moment too soon. Astrobotic was keen to round up all their payloads so they could start the cleanroom assembly.)
*Special thanks to Noelle Gaussens, my assistant, for helping with all the file handling!
The official payload declaration for Astrobotic:
BONUS!
I just found out that Writers on the Moon is listed on Astrobotic’s Wikipedia page as an official payload!
We’re on Peregrine Lander’s Mission One, which will be launched aboard a ULA (United Launch Alliance) Vulcan rocket, planned launch in July 2021.
“Peregrine will carry a maximum payload mass of 90 kilograms (200 lb) during Mission One,[49] and it is planned to land on Lacus Mortis, a relatively flat plateau at 44°N 25°E, and operate for about 8 Earth days.[27]“
Now that the hard part of shipping the payload to Astrobotic is done, we have just the fun stuff ahead: following the mission and launch, of course, but I’ll also be posting more about some of the geeky science stuff (because why not), posting the stories behind the stories for our payload, and talking about what will be coming in the manifest packages.
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Sue
Dr. Susan Kaye Quinn, Speculative Fiction Author and payload coordinator for Writers on the Moon
