Eagle Wing

The spacecraft, part of the US space agency's Constellation programme, is the vehicle that Nasa hopes will carry man to the surface of the Moon by 2020. Despite Mr Connolly's fantasies about its design, prototypes of the craft bear a striking resemblance to the Eagle lander which carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface 40 years ago. "That was an ugly, spidery spacecraft," he says. "But the Apollo engineers got a lot of things right." Like the Eagle, Altair will be delivered into orbit by a heavy-lift rocket (the Ares V, currently under development) and then ferried on towards the Moon by a command module. And like its predecessor it is a two-stage vehicle: a descent and an ascent stage.