A Fall of Moondust

The Earth–Moon interplanetary route has long been firmly established, reliable, and stable. On the Moon, a special Lunar Tourism Administration has been created: an unusual landscape, weak gravity, views of Earth, the mysteries of the Farside, magnificent starry skies, and the first settlements. In Clavius—the first lunar city—there is even the first lunar park, albeit small, not at all “a window box suffering from a grandiose delusion,” as one “talking head from television” put it.

But the dust-rover “Selen(a)”—a land-based variant of a spacecraft—during an excursion meets with an accident and, surrounded by darkness and silence, plunges into the depths of the Moon…