There is one return pod that never made it back to earth. Either human error or a mechanical malfunction, LMG won’t say which, meant it overshot the re-entry window and entered an elliptical orbit around earth. With £3M worth of cargo onboard it was deemed not valuable enough to launch an intercept mission to recover it. There’s no rush anyway - the capsule is stable in that orbit for at least the next 10,000 years.
The irony wasn't lost on the coal miners. As the coal mines closed the moon mining industry established itself. A handful of the younger miners were able to pass the medical and make the transition. One trip could earn them what it would take 2 years to earn before.
He’d given up on trying to keep his feet dry long ago - his socks were soaked through. It was actually liberating, and walking in a straight line instead of jumping from dry patch to dry patch made him three times faster.
After the loss of a supply rocket to a lightning strike just after launch in 1984 the first weather control device came in to service in 1986. It quickly became known by locals as the Abacus.
There was a K7 prototype that lay in the forest west of the launch pad for years; as the insurance company argued over the cost of its removal.
The massive power transfer arrays tracked the moon across the night sky. Despite the terrible 18% transfer efficiency power beaming was still used as the primary method of powering the mining infrastructure.
The stations still sat there from the testing phase of the XXXX project, that had been cancelled in 1981. One for every square mile. 54 in total. Most of them had been vandalised by now, but the more remote ones were largely intact.
The chamber inside the drop tower was pumped free of air, down to a near vacuum. This allowed them to do microgravity experiments in the brief time that the capsule fell.
After being turned around at the service depot a glide back booster is taken by rail to the launch pad for another launch.
It was one of those days in September where the summer comes back for one last day. James and Ewan were looking for a suitable place to launch the rocket James had got for his birthday. “Do you think it will be able to reach those clouds?” Ewan asked squinting as he looked up in to the bright autumn sky.
