Lectures / 11/05/2009 7:30 pm

The Return to the Moon. From Kepler’s “Dream” to the Age of Space Travel

The presentation stakes out a trajectory from Kepler’s early calculations of the planetary orbits (part of his seminal work Harmonices Mundi was written in Linz) to the legendary Apollo mission to the moon in 1969. The second part deals with the space travel plans of the European and US American space agencies. The lecturer is an ex-crew-member of a simulated expedition to Mars, which was staged in the deserrt in Utah. He is going to show breathtaking pictures to convey what this experi¬ment in isolation was like, which was supposed to anticipate the “great¬est adventure of our generation”. The planet, which our grandparents only knew as little red wanderer in the night sky, has been revealed over the last few years as much more similar to earth than was ever thought possible.