LuSEE-Night: See You on the Far Side of the Moon

As a kid in the 1970s, I watched the Apollo moon missions on TV, drawn like a curious moth to the cathode-ray tube’s glow. The English band Pink Floyd blared through the speakers of my mom’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, beckoning us to the dark side of the moon.The far side of the moon, the term most scientists prefer, is indeed dark (half the time), cold, and inhospitable. There’s regolith and a couple of Chinese landers—Chang’e 4 in January 2019 and Chang’e 6 in June 2024—and not much else. That could change in about a year, as Contributing Editor Ned Potter reports in “The Quest to Build a Telescope That Can Hear the Cosmic Dark Ages.” Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 2 with the LuSEE-Night radio telescope aboard will attempt to become the third successful mission to land there.The moon’s far side is the perfect place for such a telescope. The same RF waves that carried images of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the lunar surface, Roger Waters’s voice, an