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In 1969, Muggles landed the first human on the Moon. Now, in 2014, the Wizarding World is sending a Witch to the Moon—Britain’s very own Padma Patil.
You might be reading this and wondering why we’re only getting around to this now, 45 years behind the times. Our exclusive access to Ministry archives has revealed documents from the time that indicate that the Wizarding World as a whole was widely convinced that the Muggle Moon landing had been faked. After all, if Wizarding technology couldn’t have manage the feat, how could Muggles possibly keep up with our millennia of advancement? The (then) Minister for Magic, Eugenia Jenkins, was quoted in an interview with the Daily Prophet as saying that 'the whole thing smacks of a desperate American publicity stunt.'
There’s been a lot to consider before we could even take the first steps to land a Witch on the Moon.
The Moon has a vastly different atmosphere to Earth, and the effects of gravity are lessened due to the Moon’s smaller size. This makes it impossible to breathe and walk normally, and it required the development of spells that can counteract gravity’s pull. The Ministry’s Committee on Experimental Charms has spent years studying the magic of broomsticks and levitation charms and has adapted these properties to allow for normal movement under conditions of lower gravity.
Of course, there was always the looming question of whether charms would even work on the Moon—luckily, initial testing has proved positive. Orbiting the Earth at the moment is material which muggles call ‘space junk': old satellites which no longer work, bits of shuttles which broke off during re-entry into the atmosphere, waste materials jettisoned from spaceships—so nobody was going to notice when small objects started appearing and then disappearing a while later. This was the work of the Committee on Experimental Charms, who charmed various instruments against gravity and then banished them to the space junk belt to check that they worked before bringing them back to ensure that all the travel didn’t damage them.
Those of you who are muggle-born probably grew up with the quaint notion of the need for ‘Occupational Health and Safety’ (OH&S). In the wizarding world, where almost everything can be fixed with a wave of a wand and a shot of pepper-up potion, there has never been the need for excessive safety regulations and training of the 'worst case scenarios'.
Space, however, is such new territory that the Ministry saw the need to create the new Department for the Prevention of Unnecessary Catastrophes in Space, staffed entirely by muggle-borns—all of whom volunteered when they heard that no such department existed.
When asked about the new department, internally elected head of the department, Gemma Farley said, 'We were shocked and more than a little horrified that nobody had thought through the safety concerns. Travelling to the moon isn’t the same as popping off to the beach for the weekend. It’s leaving the plane and entering an astonishingly hostile environment; and when we asked about the safety precautions, all anyone would say was "she’ll be alright." So we made our own department, because we weren’t about to let a laissez-faire attitude get in the way of the biggest thing since the discovery of the 12 uses of Dragon’s blood.'
Padma’s twin sister, Parvati, is in charge of both media relations and inter-departmental co-operation, a notoriously sore point in the Ministry. “I wasn’t about to let my sister’s life be endangered by some petty inter-departmental rivalry. So now I spend most of my time making sure that everyone’s on the same page, sharing information and ideas, and making sure that the cowboys over in Experimental Charms have actually tested the charms they suggest by the time that they suggest them.” This isn’t the only role Parvati plays in this mission. In a popular hypothetical scenario considered by Muggle scientists, one twin is sent to space travelling at speeds close to the speed of light (at which point it is hypothesised that time will slow down) while the other stays on Earth, and the differences between them are considered when the first twin returns. Although no-one has yet achieved such fast space travel—Muggle or Magical—there is still interest in how such a different environment might affect the body, and twins have long been used in muggle science to observe effects over time due to their similarities.
There has been much debate as to what would be the ideal mode of transport. Apparation was deemed to be too risky, as the only way to test its safety would be to actually try it. Whilst travelling by broomstick would be technically feasible, the distance to the moon, coupled by the top speeds on the market at present, would have made it a journey of a few weeks - not nearly practicle. The only other viable option (and according to Padma, every man and his puffskein had some ridiculous notion) was the use of a Portkey.
“The workings of Portkeys are astonishingly complex, and even if your readers were to understand them, we’re quite sure the explanation would be too long for your article.” The Portkey office replied to our request for a comment. They did, however, go on to say that the reason they were able to make Portkeys to the moon and not, say, Mars, is because there are unmoving human-made landmarks on the moon (like the 1969 US flag), to which they can position the portkeys relative.
However, the Ministry’s announcement of the new wizarding scientific endeavor was not met wholeheartedly. While some criticized the endeavour as a publicity stunt to appease the recent calls for muggle integration, other lashed out at the venture as a flaunting of the tenets of wizarding knowledge. For many, the the importance of the stars in a basic precept of the wizarding world that helps distinguish us from muggles. For others, they worry about the danger of bringing unknown magical elements to the Earth surface. Notably, Firenze of the Centaurs of the Forbidden Forest near Hogwarts spoke on behalf of his community, “The night sky is direly important to the Centaurs and directly involved in the future of the magical races. Though some condemn outright the muggle influence on the night bodies, as a whole, our community urges extreme caution when thinking about witches and wizards travelling and affecting the stars. Should this persist, the Centaurs will not hesitate to bring this issue to the Ministry of Magic.”
Though there are detractors, at the time of this article’s submission, Padma will be landing on the moon and will return, via portkey, over this month. All signs point to this mission being a success. Once she returns, there will be several months of analysing the data she has gathered, testing to ascertain what (if any) physiological changes are caused by space travel and experimenting with the substances she has sampled to determine what, if at all, magical properties they hold. All your correspondents can be certain of at present is the fact that these are two inspirational witches who will not only go down in history as defenders of our people at the Battle of Hogwarts, but will also always be remembered within the annals of wizarding scientific history.
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