Somnium programme

The Somnium programme was the crewed lunar programme of the European Federation. Its first crew landed in Mare Tranquillitatis on 19 September 1973, commanded by Jan Wierzbicki of Poland, with the French engineer Hélène Marchand, the first woman on the Moon. Somnium made five landings, the last in 1979, including the first landing on the far side of the Moon in 1977, and returned about 260 kg of lunar samples.

The programme was run by the Federal Space Agency and launched from Kourou, in French Guiana. It is named after Somnium, Johannes Kepler's 1608 story of a journey to the Moon, and its spacecraft after the story's narrator, Duracotus, and its name for the Moon, Levania.

Background

The European Defence Force's rocket establishment at Hammaguir, in the Algerian Sahara, launched the first artificial satellite, Kepler 1, on 9 May 1956. The Federal Space Agency was formed in 1959 to take over civil spaceflight, and on 14 June 1960 it put the first person into orbit, the Czechoslovak air force pilot Václav Kubeš, in the capsule Tycho 1. A probe of the same year returned the first photographs of the far side of the Moon.

After the United States announced its lunar programme in 1961, the Federal Space Agency proposed a crewed landing of its own. The member states disagreed for three years over its cost and over the share of the work each would receive, and agreed in 1964 to fund it from the federal budget, with contracts divided among them in proportion to their contributions. The same agreement funded a launch site at Kourou, near the equator, from which launches began in 1968. The programme's spending peaked in 1971 at about 3% of the federal budget.

Its astronauts were drawn from the member states' air forces and, from 1966, from engineers and scientists. Each landing crew was made up of three nationalities.

Spacecraft

Somnium crews were launched on the Vesta heavy launcher, a three-stage rocket about 105 m tall. The spacecraft carried three crew: the command ship Duracotus, which remained in lunar orbit with one pilot, and the lander Levania, which took the other two to the surface and back. H&A built the landers' guidance and electrical systems. The Levania was larger than its American counterpart, and carried supplies for three days on the surface from the first landing.

From 1975 the landers carried a pressurised rover, in which a crew could live for two days away from the lander.

Missions

Crews flew in Earth orbit from 1966 and around the Moon in 1971. The first landing was made in Mare Tranquillitatis on 19 September 1973, the Federation's Founding Day, five years after Lodestar's. Wierzbicki and Marchand spent three days on the surface.

The fourth landing was made in Mare Pragense, a far-side basin named from the photographs of 1960, with communication relayed through a satellite in lunar orbit. It was the first landing out of sight of Earth.

End of the programme

The Federal Council ended the programme after the fifth landing, in 1979, and its budget passed to uncrewed missions and to satellites in Earth orbit. Kourou remained the Federation's main launch site until 2022.

Legacy

The Federation's lunar programme continued with uncrewed orbiters and landers from the 1990s, and crews returned to the Moon on survey missions between 2014 and 2018. The Federation's lunar base, built from 2021, stands in Mare Tranquillitatis about 40 km from the first Somnium landing site. Kourou was closed in 2022, after the infestation reached French Guiana, and the Federation's launches have since been made by H&A's spaceplane from sites in Europe.

The Somnium samples are held at the Federal Space Agency's laboratory in Leiden. Streets and schools in many cities of the Federation are named after Hélène Marchand.

See also

• Moon
• Project Lodestar
• Kaltkrieg