preparation for their missions to the moon. they need to replicate what it is like on the south pole of the moon, where the sun is very low, right in your eyesight, but everywhere else is pitch black. nasa believes, there is water ice on the south pole. a possible source of drinking water, and rocket fuel. but, as colder, with less sunlight, lisa shore is the deputy chief of the pool lab. you will have this dusk lighting, and behind any large rock, or things like that, you will have a long shadow where we ll be pitch black. certainly, it s easier to drive when you are in the sunlight. absolutely. those shadows are so long. already, astronauts are using simulators to practice driving a rover on the moon. so, astronauts need to learn how to drive a rover, without going into one of these holes, and craters. exactly. you, very often, don t know how deep these creators are. it is difficult to tell how big these rocks are, with 18 inches
the lessons learned from apollo. the tragedies, and the triumphs. from the base here, at the eagle has landed. as it aims for a permanent return to the moon. rocket tranquility, we copy you on the ground. you have a lot of guys about to turn blue, we re breathing again, thanks a lot. a lot changed since july 1969 when this mission control room put neil armstrong, and buzz aldrin, on the moon. back then, it was about human exploration. innovation, technology. learning what is beyond the earth. 50 plus years later, it is, also, about a strategic, a national security imperative. and again tomorrow, geostrategic s chess game, playing out 200 miles above earth. where one wrong move, can take out an entire constellation of satellites, upon which, the global economy, and our gps system, depends.
it s been there all along. it has been! they said, let s park the curtains, pull it out, there and you could do with their. you could pull up the gps satellites, the gps is a military project from navigation. this is dan quality base, the eagle has landed. where than 50 years since neil armstrong, first landing on the moon in 1969. one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. in 1967 straight, signed by 111 countries, including the u.s., still in effect. it is an exploration of space, and is on the way with it space. they re conducting military maneuvers. the u.n. treaty came in with nuclear weapons. that s beautiful. then as i got older, a little
a hostile act in space? we are working through that now, we don t have that history like we do in the other demands to be open, so as we are encountering these threatening activities for the first time, it is forcing us to really define these terms. when we come back, china s ambitions to play a dominant role in space, on the moon, and beyond. people couldn t see my potential. so i had to show them. i ve run this place for 20 years, but i still need to prove that i m more than what you see on paper.
best orbit for a future space station called gateway, that will orbit the moon. this is capstone, the actual size, it is around 50 pounds or, so it has these deployable solar panels that the key to this is the antenna on top, which transmits and connects directly with an orbiting nasa satellite. what we are creating is a gps of the moon that is expandable to effectively become the foundation for what the internet of the moon of the future might look like. and captain is also helping the u.s. gain the high ground with eyes on that cysts lunar space. you are not running a spy satellite, necessarily. but can you see what some chinese satellite activity already? the underlying capabilities we have, to fly a satellite at the moon, allows us to also take other data and track other satellites at the moon, whether it be nasa or other countries. in one of you already seen? we detected an oddly tracked satellite from china that was returning to the moon late last year. how do you