“The Moon has that gravity where man floats. It deserves a visit not from the military, but from dancers and you and me.”
I remembered this part of the song composed by Herbert Vianna and Tetê Tillett and released in 1991 on the Paralamas do Sucesso album.
Why the memory? Because the Moon is in the spotlight these days due to the Artemis 2 mission, a manned flight by NASA, the US space agency, to circumvent the Earth’s satellite. The Orion spacecraft has three military personnel among the four crew members.
Mysterious since ancient times, the Moon has its influences: it affects the tides through gravitational force, is an element present in astrological mappings and constantly affects people’s imagination.
Romantics like to date under the moonlight, superstitious people choose the phase she is in to cut her hair and even an adjective was created for her: lunatic, which would have originated in the Middle Ages due to the belief that unstable attitudes came from the lunar stages.
Currently, anyone who is irrational, rambling or crazy is called a lunatic. In the latter sense, Deyverson fits in, the priceless Deyvinho (ex-Palmeiras and Atlético-MG), one of the colorful characters of Brazilian football, currently playing in Ecuador.
Lua made me quote Deyverson, but when thinking about her, I immediately came to the natural question for anyone who writes about what I write about. Can you play football there?
The straight answer, and I don’t need to be an astronomer to give it, is “no.” Man hasn’t even set foot on its dusty soil since 1972, on the Apollo 17 mission, so hitting a ball is out of the question.
Is it hypothetically possible, if one day we manage to inhabit it? In theory, it is. But it would be a practice that would minimally resemble the game we know. As the Moon’s gravity is one-sixth that of Earth’s and its atmosphere is thin, a kick would take more than a minute to complete and would make the ball travel more than four football fields.
It would be a match played all the time in slow motion, with the players moving languidly and wearing uniforms not with shirts, shorts, socks and boots but with very heavy space suits, with helmets, boots and oxygen support.
Unfeasible for now, perhaps one day it will happen, as there are plans for a landing on the surface of the Moon within this decade.
That being said, organizing a “luabol” or “futelua” match will take time, it won’t be a one-and-done game: there will be no field, no goals, no VAR – someone who loves the boring technology will notice the wretched man’s absence.
However, it is enough to have a round of 70 cm in circumference in the luggage of anyone studying in the round of circumference of 10.9 thousand km for an immediate start.
I think of the most popular sport in the world and I use round to allude to the soccer ball, my favorite. It is necessary to give credit to another, the redondinha, which had its moment of protagonism in the roundon. In fact, not just one, but two.
Golf balls, with a circumference of 134 millimeters and a weight of 45.9 grams, were hit on the Moon by astronaut Alan Shepard, commander of Apollo 14, in 1971. One traveled 22 meters; the other, 37 meters.
For the website golf.esp.br, “a small slice for a golfer, but a big leap for the sport”.
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