ABOUT

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Our Vision

The Moon will play a central role in the evolution of the Human species into a Spacefaring Civilization. The Moon will not only become a place to develop and perfect critical space technologies, it will be a premier destination for millions who wish to experience the ultimate lifetime adventure. Within the next generation, ever larger large scale permanent towns and cities will be built on the Moon.

Lunar tourism will become a major economic driver for permanent settlement and continued development.

As the price of a visit to the Moon drops over time, it will eventually become affordable to mainstream consumers and accessible to the average person. Virtual Moon will be the ultimate expression of that Vision. Virtual Moon will be a glimpse into the kind of Future we can build. A main feature and destination on Virtual Moon will be Selene - a large scale permanent resort city built on Malapert Moutain. Selene will be a bold and inspiring vision of what is possible within our lifetime.

Our Mission

Our mission is to give every person on Earth the opportunity to experience being on the Moon. Within one year of opening Virtual Moon to the public, our goal is to virtually transport ONE MILLION people to the Moon. Virtual Moon will be open and free for everyone to explore and to enjoy! You are all invited to experience being on the Moon in the most accurate, detailed, and realistic immersive simulation ever created. We want to ignite the imagination of young people and inspire entire generations of children and young adults to the realization that they can actively participate in creating that Future.

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Virtual Moon STEM / STEAM Initiatives

The Moon as the ultimate class trip.

Remember how much fun your class field trips were? Imagine if you could take a field trip to the Moon. Maybe you would go visit one of the Apollo landing sites. You could walk around all the surface instruments, look at all the tools and random objects left at the site by the Apollo astronauts, and inspect the landing stage up close. The AR enabled advanced visor in your spacesuit helmet allows you to look at any object and get a full and detailed description of what that object is. If it’s a science instrument, you can learn how it was designed, what data it was designed to collect and what information we found out about the Moon from the data it collected.


You have the entire history of Lunar exploration and detailed information about the science and technology involved within your reach. Not from a book or a computer screen, but from information you can interactively call up while actually standing on the Moon!

You can explore the surface, learn to navigate the Lunar map, learn about the relative motions of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, learn about Moon phases, solar and lunar eclipses, and much more.


Virtual Moon in itself, an exact, detailed, and photorealistic replica of the Moon in every way, offers a rich learning environment that can be fully explored interactively using the most natural and intuitive interface possible.


Virtual Moon Class trip

Selene City – Field trips to the future

Through the magic of Virtual Reality, Virtual Moon includes the ability to time travel. We will take you to the top of Malapert Mountain in the year 2045. The first large scale permanent city on the Moon has just become operational. Selene is a magnificent engineering marvel. A bold and daring vision that pushes the envelope on advanced technology and engineering to build a city on the Moon capable of supporting 5,000 people in complete security and safety while providing super luxury accommodations.


How would you like to take a guided tour of Selene and learn all the intricate details of how it was built and how it works? Learn about the life support systems, the power systems, food production. Learn about the AI that runs the entire complex, the robotics and control systems needed to operate it, maintain it, and make repairs. Anything you are curious about is just a click or a voice command away.


Selene will not just be a fully immersive and interactive visual simulation. It will be a true Digital Twin showcasing all the essential engineering systems and subsystems that make such an installation possible. Selene will be a tour de force engineering demonstration that this bold and ambitious vision is actually something that we can build by 2045.


Virtual Moon City Selene

The Lunar Academy – Curiosity driven learning adventures

You can think of the Moon simulation and of Selene as the first two layers of STEM educational content and experiences in Virtual Moon. The Lunar Academy is the the third layer or central core of our STEM content. The Lunar Academy will be a curiosity driven learning environment. Self paced for each individual participant with multiple layers of content that get progressively deeper into the subject matter of interest to each person.


It will primarily consist of a series of hands-on virtual labs that allow and encourage students to explore many interests in fully immersive and highly interactive VR environments. Each lab will have an subject matter entry level which is basically a sandbox where students can learn important concepts intuitively by just playing with and manipulating virtual objects, tools and materials.


A good example to illustrate this will be the Gravity Lab. The Gravity Lab will feature a large transparent walled cube inside of which a zero gravity environment is simulated. Students can place various objects inside this cube and see how they behave gravitationally. Take two billiard balls for example and place them inside the cube with as little motion as possible. In a few moments, you will observe that the balls are slowly beginning to accelerate towards each other due to their mutual gravitational attraction. They will pick up speed and eventually collide, then bounce off each other and move away slowing down to eventually stop and begin attracting each other again, repeating this cycle over and over but losing a small amount of energy each time they bounce.


In a second experiment, you might want to give one of the balls a very slight tangential velocity and watch as the two billiard balls begin orbiting each other. The try it with a billiard ball and a bowling ball. This kind of “sandbox” playing will give you a powerful intuitive understanding of how gravity works. You can build on that understanding by accessing an almost unlimited amount of information about the physical principles, mathematics and mechanics of objects in gravitational fields all the way to complex orbital mechanics, black hole collisions and gravity waves.


All our other virtual labs in the Lunar Academy will use a similar approach. The first planned group of Virtual Labs will include:


  • Astrobiology
  • Robotics
  • Atoms and Molecules
  • Radiation and Nuclear Power
  • Life Support
  • Electricity and Magnetism
  • Relativity

Virtual Moon outreach

Beyond the content that will be included in the Virtual Moon experience itself, our Virtual Moon volunteers around the world are actively engaging with local schools and communities to share the excitement of Space exploration and inspire young people about amazing possibilities of a Space Faring future, a future that they can actively participate in creating through learning about Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics and considering careers in those areas.


Through our non-profit Virtual Moon outreach, we are providing Virtual Reality headsets shipped to our volunteers so they can reach students all around the world, including remote and underserved communities. We want everyone to be able to experience what it’s like to be on the Moon. We believe this will radically change and clarify the concept of what Space is and where we all are relative to it. Looking back at the Earth while standing on the Moon will make it absolutely clear, in a deeply personal and visceral way, that we are all already in Space, sharing a tiny and fragile spaceship called Earth.


If you would like to join our outreach volunteers, please let us know


Virtual Moon Outreach

Our team

Meet Our Volunteers

Our Story

Lunar Explorer - VM’s first incarnation

Many of our Virtual Moon team share a similar memory of how our passion for the Moon was ignited. We were all witnesses to history being made as Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Lunar surface. My own personal memory of the event — an event which I have come to regard as the single greatest moment in all of human history so far - is of being excited at the thought of a future where anyone could one day go visit the Moon and I certainly wanted to be among those. As a ten-year-old year old in July of 1969, I figured that in another 3 of my lifetimes, somewhere around the year 2000, that future that I was imagining would have become a reality. By the year 2000, I thought, I would be able to stand on the surface of the Moon and look back at Earth!

Alas, it was not to be. As the year 2000 arrived, not only had we had failed to build the future I had dreamed of and hoped for. Worse, there was no plan in place to make it happen. America and the world had abandoned the vision. My dream of one day visiting the Moon was just never going to happen.

Reflecting on this I realized that I had no right to feel disappointed. After all, what had I personally done to contribute, in even the smallest measure, to making that imagined future a reality? The honest answer is that I had never lifted a finger; I had done absolutely nothing!

It’s not that I imagined that anything I could have done in those 30 years that elapsed since I saw the live broadcast from the Moon would have made any difference at all. It was just a feeling that there were countless things within my power that I could have done, regardless of the outcome, that I just failed to do. If you have a dream, and it’s a real and persistent dream, you have an obligation to do whatever is in your power to work towards the realization of that dream.

I went online and looked for groups and organizations that shared my passion for the Moon. I found an organization called the Space Frontier Foundation. Their mission statement hit home in a very profound way: “To open the Space Frontier for all of Humanity within our lifetime”. They were having a “Return To The Moon” conference in Las Vegas. I immediately signed up for a membership and registered for the Las Vegas Conference. My thinking at the time was that I would volunteer for any job or task that needed to be done. Even if it was just stuffing and mailing envelopes. No matter how menial the task might be, it would be more than doing nothing.

The “Return To The Moon” conference was an amazing experience! I had expected that a few thousand people would be attending. I was initially disappointed that only about a hundred people showed up. But that turned out to be the best part of it: with only a hundred people at the conference I got to meet and talk to almost everyone there. Fast forward 20 years to today: many of those people are now leaders in the private commercial efforts to build new launch systems and develop the technologies that will enable our conquest of Space.

Concurrently with my increased involvement and work with the SFF, I created a company called Lunar Explorer, found private investors, found a software developer and we created the world’s first fully immersive, interactive, Virtual Reality simulation of the Moon, which is also called Lunar Explorer.

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Moon Rover

As a result of my involvement and my new network of connections within the Space Advocacy community, I looked for more opportunities to contribute. I became a very active member of the Space Frontier Foundation, taking on roles of increasing responsibility. Eventually , I became Return To The Moon Project Manager and I ended up running the Return To The Moon IV and Return To The Moon V Conferences. Our Conference Chairs and keynote speakers were Captain John Young for RTM IV and Andrew Chaikin for RTM V. One particular highlight of RTM V was the presentation of an award to Dr. George Mueller who headed the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA. The Hero of The Moon award was presented to Dr. Mueller at the RTM Gala Dinner. The presentation included a 5 minute tribute video highlighting Dr. Mueller’s leadership of the Apollo program from 1963 to 1969.

Lunar Explorer helped me realize my dream of one day visiting the Moon. Using the Virtual Reality mode of Lunar Explorer, I have been to every Apollo landing site, every Surveyo site and all of the Soviet Luna sites. I have walked around the surface experiments at each Apollo site, walked from the Apollo12 landing site to Surveyor 2, stood at the edge of Hadley Rille, slid down the slopes of Copernicus Crater and visited many hundreds of other locations.

As of late 2004, Lunar Explorer was available for sale online through a number of space websites: — (the Space Frontier Foundation, The Moon Society, the National Space Society, Space.com, as well as on Amazon).

If you would like to download a copy of Lunar Explorer, just email us your request.

contact us

By happy coincidence, even though Lunar Explorer was created over 15 years ago, it runs fairly well on any Windows 10 PC or laptop. Understandably, we are very proud of Lunar Explorer. It remains still, to this day, the world’s ONLY fully immersive, interactive, Virtual Reality simulation of the Moon.

Lunar Explorer was an ambitious project. However, you will remember that 15 years ago there were no consumer level Virtual Reality headsets on the market. The new VR headsets like Oculus and Vive were still a decade away. So, even though LE was a fully implemented VR experience, most users who purchased the simulation were only able to see it on their computer displays. The absence of the sense of immersion greatly diminished the impact of the user experience. In spite of this, we received universal acclaim from many users who shared their unsolicited reactions via emails.

And that brings us to where we are today

Since the advent of Oculus, Vive and other VR headsets, we have been working on a plan to create a new version of Lunar Explorer that will run on these new VR platforms. It will include all of the features of the original Lunar Explorer Version 1.0 but will be massively upgraded with new high resolution Lunar surface topography from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission (LRO had not yet launched when LE version 1.0 was built); it will have photorealistic 3D graphics detail and quality, very high resolution, and it will have many new added interactivity features.

We have put together a team of world class experts and partners to make Virtual Moon a reality. The team includes retired NASA Astronaut and MIT Professor Jeff Hoffman, former Disney Imagineeering VP, inventor and former NYU Professor Eric Rosenthal, Star Trek special effects producer Dan Curry, and “A Man On The Moon” author Andrew Chaikin, among other well-known leaders in the Space and Space Technology community.

Development of the Virtual Moon simulation is being done by the multi-award- winning VR/AR company E-spaces, – the world’s oldest continuously operating VR/AR studio founded and led by VR veteran Philippe Van Nedervelde. Philippe shares similar memories of being a witness to History during the Apollo years and an even bigger passion for Space and for the Moon than mine. Since his teenage years, he has accumulated an impressive list of accomplishments as a proponent of the vision of our Future in Space.

When we first made contact, we formed an immediate friendship about our shared passion for creating a direct, personal , and deeply inspiring experience of space for everyone. The decision to move forward as partners on Virtual Moon was instantaneous. Our entire team at Virtual Moon is excited to bring you this unique experience. Until you can physically go to the Moon, Virtual Moon will take you there virtually.

Thank you for your interest!

We hope to welcome you all to the Moon in the next few months.

We will update our progress here regularly.

Please come visit again… and let your friends know.

Manny Pimenta
Founder and CEO
Virtual Moon

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FAQs

  • 1. How is Virtual Moon different from other simulations of the Moon?

    Virtual Moon is on a mission to change people’s perspective of Space in a way that creates a clear understanding of what Space is and our place in it and creates a more personal, direct and visceral connection with Space and the Moon. We are committed to creating a simulation that is accurate and realistic to the last detail, limited only by the performance of existing VR technology and available data sets for the Moon, while simultaneously pushing the envelope to deliver on our promise. Both the technology and access to better data sets are expected to drastically improve in the near future. Virtual Moon will continuously update the simulation as the technology evolves and better / higher resolution data becomes available. We are committed to be the world’s best simulation of the entire Moon and to remain so indefinitely.


    For some interesting context, in 2006 (more than 20 years ago!), our founder Manny Pimenta was also the creator of Lunar Explorer, the world’s first fully immersive, fully interactive, Virtual Reality simulation of the entire Moon and owns all intellectual rights to it. Virtual Moon has thus inherited the rights to Lunar Explorer and, by virtue of this inheritance, we could instantly claim to be the world’s best VR simulation of the Moon since there have been no others created in the interim.


  • 2. How can you make you Virtual Moon available to everyone for free?

    First, to fulfill our mission, we believe it is most important that everyone has the opportunity to experience the Moon. If we were to charge people for it, it would immediately become a barrier to some who live in underprivileged and / or underserved economic areas of the world. It would most seriously impact our effort to reach young people who have limited financial resources. So we are raising the funding we need from various sources to cover the costs of developing Virtual Moon and of supporting its ongoing operations. One of the most important funding sources are individuals who believe in our mission and make personal donations to make this happen. If we can fully fund Virtual Moon from personal donations, that would be our preferred source. That’s because it will involve a great many individuals who believe in the cause and the mission of Virtual Moon and who want to actively participate and rightfully claim credit for their contribution in making Virtual Moon a reality. This would also have the most desirable and welcome effect of organically building a grassroots worldwide Virtual Moon community. This also addresses another Virtual Moon core value which is to offer our users and community members tangible opportunities to contribute and participate in the mission of building a Space Faring Civilization.


    Finally, we believe that by offering a VR experience like no other and making it universally accessible, we will create large scale user interest and generate ongoing, sustained engagement, both of which can be easily monetized.


  • 3. Do I have to own a VR headset to be able to access the Virtual Moon simulation?

    The short answer is no, you don’t have to own a VR headset to access Virtual Moon. All content will be accessible via any device from smart phone to tablet, to laptop, and VR/AR/XR headsets. However, Virtual Moon is designed to deliver the most realistic, immersive experience of being on the Moon short of actually going there. The immersion and hands-on interactivity that Virtual Moon will offer, the profound impact of feeling like you are on the Moon, can really only be experienced in immersive VR. We envision that most users will use multiple devices at different times to access different aspects of Virtual Moon. They will likely use VR to explore the Moon, to enjoy the many fantastic views at the most interesting locations on the Moon and interact with hands-on experiences. And they will likely use 2D screens to do transactions, stay in touch with friends in the VM community, get news and updates from Virtual Moon, etc.


    Also consider that VR headsets are quite affordable already (with the Quest 3S unit selling at $300 in the US) and likely to become more affordable, even while offering performance improvements, as the technology evolves. So we feel confident that immersive VR accessibility will significantly expand rather quickly. If you do not yet own VR headset, please take a look at some of our videos and watch how people react to the Apollo 11 Landing Experience. Many of them will tell you that alone is worth the cost of buying a headset. (and NO, we do not make a commission on VR headsets… Would be nice if we did though )


    In keeping with our primary mission, Virtual Moon is also supplying VR headsets to our volunteers around the world who are bringing the experience of being on the Moon to remote underserved and underprivileged areas of the world.


  • 4. How can I join the Virtual Moon Ambassador program?

    Since you are asking the question, we presume you are already familiar with what a Virtual Moon Ambassador is. For the benefit of those who will read these FAQs later and may not have the context, I will briefly describe the program: Basically, anyone can become a Virtual Moon Ambassador. We already have a large number of VM Ambassadors but need quite a few more. We expect we will reach our target number of total Ambassadors rather quickly and at that point we will most likely eliminate the program, make the requirements more challenging, or replace it with something different. To become a Virtual Moon Ambassador right now, you simply need to commit to sharing the new of Virtual Moon with your circle of friends and invite them to join the Virtual Moon community. If 5 or more of your friends decide to join, you become a Virtual Moon Ambassador. That’s really all there is. However, you can lose your VMA membership by doing anything that intentionally or predictably tarnishes the image of Virtual Moon or significantly detracts from its mission. Nothing to worry about as long as you operate in good faith, never take advantage of people, and respect the Virtual Moon community as a whole and its individual members.


    As a Virtual Moon Ambassador, once you have met your requirement of referring 5 new members, you will receive 100,000 square meters of Virtual Moon property and the option to receive an unlimited number of additional 100,000 square meter parcels at a greatly discounted 1% of the normal cost. For each $10 donation, you will be credited with 100,000 square meters of Virtual Moon property ( which would have cost $1,000 other wise). This is our way of showing our appreciation for your efforts in promoting Virtual Moon and your active participation in the mission of Virtual Moon. Your donations, as we explain in the website content, will be supporting the development of Virtual Moon and also our world outreach programs.


    There are other privileges and incentives enjoyed by our Virtual Moon Ambassadors that are explained in more detail here.


    This arrangement will hold until the Virtual Moon Ambassador program is closed to new members and the discounted parcel gifts are discontinued.


  • 5. How can I volunteer for the Virtual Moon outreach program?

    Just sign in and join the Virtual Moon community and let us know you would like to volunteer for the outreach program.


    As an outreach volunteer you would go to schools in your area and speak with students about Space, the Moon, the importance of becoming a Space Faring Civilization and you would then let them experience being on the Moon by doing the Apollo 11 Landing Experience. If you have your own VR headset already, that would be great of course. If you don’t own one, you might consider purchasing one or two yourself to bring to your talks. But the best thing to do would be for you to find a local donor or sponsor ( like a business, a philanthropic group or club, or an individual donor) who would pay for two or three headsets that Virtual Moon would purchase and have shipped to you. You should have at least 2 headsets and ideally 3 depending on the size of the group you are speaking to and the time available.’ Virtual Moon will support you with content, materials, promotion, official recognition and also videos that are very compelling to entice donors and show them how effective our program is in promoting Space and STEM.


  • 6. What is the idea behind selling Virtual Moon property?

    We have been doing outreach for a while now and we use the opportunity, when interacting with students and young people, to find out what they want us to create for them as part of the Virtual Moon experience and also what excites them most about our plans. The idea of owning property on Virtual Moon is received universally with enthusiastic approval. They also let us know that one of the most exciting things they can think of doing with their properties is to build something on them.


    So we see this as a significant and important way of creating that direct personal connection between Space and the Moon and each individual person. Experiencing the Moon in an immersive and realistic Virtual Reality simulation is a powerful way to create that type of connection. Having the ability to own an actual portion of terrain on Virtual Moon that exactly corresponds to a real location on the real Moon takes that sense of connection to a whole new level. It is very inspirational and it really ignites their imagination.


    Naturally, we see this also as an opportunity to generate funds that will be used for developing Virtual Moon and supporting operations. Part of the funds raised this way will also be used to support our worldwide outreach programs to bring this amazing experience to other students and young people around the world who would otherwise not have that opportunity.


    Allowing the Virtual Moon community to own property is important in yet another way: it is another way each individual can feel that they are personally contributing to the creation of Virtual Moon and are actively participating in promoting Spae


  • 7. How can you be sure that Selene will actually be constructable?

    Well, first because we are making that an actual design requirement. In other words, if it’s not constructable, we will have to keep changing the design until it is. Secondly, we are making a number of assumptions that we believe are reasonable and rational and those assumptions give us capabilities that will be critical in the future but don’t exist yet.


    And thirdly, we have already done some first pass planning and studies that show that building Selene on the Moon likely has more than a zero probability of being technically feasible.


    It’s important to understand that with Selene, we are only considering the technical / engineering feasibility. We know there are many layers of complexities in non technical areas that lower the probability of actually building Selene to just about zero. But our purpose with the Selene concept is to create a bold and inspiring vision of the future could look like when we become a Space Faring Civilization and to be able to use immersive VR to transport millions of people to that future in a way that they can no just watch it or read about it but actually EXPERIENCE what it will be like. We start with a baseline design for Selene that is admittedly simple and general. We are enlisting expertise from our Virtual Moon team members and other volunteers with specialized knowledge and skills to begin developing and refining the design, identifying technology and capability gaps, and finding pathways to achieving primary project objectives. We will iterate the design step by step, while adhering strictly to the core design guidelines and continuously assessing our progress is taking us closer to the goals.


    We expect we may run into situations where a particularly ambitious goal for the vision of Selene may not be achievable and therefore render Selene unbuildable. In those cases, we will have to either forego or modify that goal unless we come up with a viable / feasible solution. To illustrate with a simple, trivial example, let’s say that we find the scale of Selene is just too ambitious. We cannot build a structure to house 5,000 people, but we can build one with the maximum capacity for 3,000 people. We would just scale back the number of people to keep the design realizable. Conversely we could find the opposite, that it would be only slightly more ambitious but still feasible to build Selene to support 10,000 people. Then we would again change the design to accommodate the larger vision. That’s because we want Selene to be as bold and ambitious as we can imagine, constrained only by engineering feasibility.