Steve Durst, a space enthusiast, who has been a fixture of the space community for many years, and who gave a very exciting presentation on galaxies at a Schiller Institute conference in New Jersey last year, passed away at his home in California. Steve had recently returned from a space conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Steve was one of those people you often run into in the space community. He was not an engineer or an astronaut. He had an MA in history, but he was enthusiastic about space from the Apollo years. When China began thinking about a possible space program already in the 1980s, Steve became interested and began to learn more about China, its history and culture. He set up the Space Age Publishing Company in 1977 and began publishing books on China’s astronaut training.
In 2007 Steve established the International Lunar Observatory Organization (ILOA) on Hawaii, which was intent on building an observatory on the South Pole of the Moon. Several short-term devices were flown by private companies. When China announced its plans to fly the Chang’e-7 to the lunar south pole and put out tenders to interested parties, Steve got in contact with them and signed an agreement to send an ILOA telescope, a small optical camera with a 20-mm aperture, to the Moon with Chang’e-7. From the moon’s airless surface, it will capture wide-field images of the Milky Way and other celestial objects while testing technology for future lunar observatories.
