Before We Build on the Moon, We Have to Master the Commute

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in Cis-lunar space, which is between the Earth and the Moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them. Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seems to have a masochistic streak – or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math – to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits.