Dr. Imani Okafor
Station director, geochemist
People think the quiet is empty. It is the opposite: you can hear the whole station think.
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Lunar hospitality and research · Sinus Medii, near side
A quiet place, 384,400 kilometres from anywhere. Stay a week, a lunar day, or the whole lunation.
There is no weather here. No wind to carry sound, no cloud to hide the stars. Selene is a station built for stillness, for research and for the long view — four hundred thousand kilometres from the nearest inbox.
01 · The rim
Pads are cut into the lip of the crater, in sunlight for 89 percent of the year. Guests arrive in daylight, the descent is felt as a slow exhale.
A heated gallery runs 400 metres inside the rim, where the temperature holds near −20 °C and the Earth never leaves the window.
On the floor, sunlight has not arrived in two billion years. Our crews cut water ice at 40 K, the quietest place we know of.
02 · The lunar day
Sunlight arrives sideways. Shadows run twenty times the height of a person and the array unfolds, panel by panel.
The regolith reaches +106 °C. Work happens in the shaded galleries; the greenhouse is fed by light piped down from the mast.
The sun slides along the horizon for two days. Everyone gathers at the west window for the last light.
−173 °C and the stars all day. Earth hangs full overhead, about forty-three times brighter than a full Moon over your head at home.
03 · Build your stay
Choose what your party needs. Everything is delivered in advance by the cargo lander and linked before you arrive.
Power is balanced. The night is carried by the regolith thermal store.
04 · The window
From the near side the Earth does not rise and set. It hangs in one place, turning once a day and passing through its phases every month. Move the slider to see the sky from any day of your stay.
Earth lit: 89%. Earthshine on the surface is about 43 times brighter than moonlight at home, enough to read by.
05 · Mission crew
Station director, geochemist
People think the quiet is empty. It is the opposite: you can hear the whole station think.
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Hospitality and life support
I set the table for guests four hundred thousand kilometres from the nearest restaurant. Nobody has complained.
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Greenhouse lead
The first tomato of the month always goes to whoever has been looking at Earth the longest.
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Surface operations
Walking is a kind of slow flying here. You learn to land softly and to take your time.
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06 · Seat manifest