On January 8, last Monday, the Peregrine 1 lander carrying Nasa scientific equipment took off on top of the Vulcan Centaur rocket at Cape Canaveral on its way to the Moon, the first attempt at a soft landing there in fifty years. And inside the lander is a copy of Kemptville author Mike Blouin’s novel, “Skin House”. As Mike says, it’s “a little bit of Kemptville leaving our Earth for the surface of the Moon”.
The novel is set in Kemptville, and was named the Best Novel in Canada in the national ReLit Award for Best Novel for 2020. He had won the same award in 2009.
Peregrine is set to land on February 23 and will seek to gather data about the lunar surface ahead of planned future human missions. Mike’s novel is one of a number of non-scientific payloads on board the lander, including a Japanese “lunar dream capsule” that contains 185,872 messages from children from around the world.
Congratulations to Mike. Other people have managed to put North Grenville on the map, but this is the first time someone put it on the Moon!
