More than 40% of the way along now. I’m still in (on?) Oceanus Procellarum — near the second “l”, in fact — but aside from that there seem to have been very few named features, or unnamed ones for that matter, near my route for some weeks.
Hot on the heels of the US’s pivot back to boots on the Moon, and perhaps not entirely unrelatedly, Bigelow Aerospace has just announced plans to put a private space station in Lunar orbit. Bigelow’s not quite the household word SpaceX is, but they’ve been putting expandable spacecraft into Earth orbit for over a decade now. In fact the one they launched in 2006 is still going. They’re uncrewed, so far. Their BEAM module is attached to the ISS, mostly just sitting empty but providing data on how well their design works. What they’re saying now is that they’re going to send a 330 cubic meter habitat into Earth orbit on a ULA Vulcan around 2021, test it out for a year, and then send it to the Moon by late 2022 “to serve as a lunar depot” — whatever that means. 
We’ll see. It seems a very big step up from where they are now, but maybe. If they stick to that schedule, a big if, then presumably it’ll be in space, though maybe not yet to the Moon, by the time I finish this walk.
Coordinates now: 2.74°S, 35.22°W
Photo: Model of Bigelow B330; photo by James E. Scarborough
MoonWalk kmz file (for Google Earth — View >> Explore >> Moon)
Walking in Space 
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