Moon Landing (Statesmanship Earth)

The Orion missions culminated in a successful moon landing (Orion-8) on March 17th, 1971. Two North Point Sea Command astronauts (Virgil Hilts and Archibald "Archie" Ives) were the first men to step onto the Moon, with Hilts uttering the now-infamous phrase "it's as dark as the crack of the devil's ass" after touching down on the Lunar surface. Hilts was unaware that his radio transceiver was turned on, and was reprimanded for using foul language over military radio frequencies. The phrase was later adopted by many brands as a slogan, and Lucky Strike cigarettes even introduced a brand of "extra dark" cigarillos termed "Hilts' Lunar Cigars", which failed abysmally in the marketplace.

Hilts and Ives performed a 23 minute spacewalk before returning to the Orion lander and, eventually, to Earth, where they splashed down in the Ingenic Ocean off the Fortaleza and were recovered by a Praetonian aircraft carrier. Rumors that the pair discovered an abandoned and destroyed Vekhistani lander on the Moon were unconfirmed until the Songian Yinghuo-3 mission discovered the remnants of the Vekhistani Progress-1, as well as the frozen and mummified bodies of the two Vekhistani cosmonauts (Anatoliy Sergetov and Yevgeni Boukreev) wearing the characteristic blue Adidas tracksuits of the Vekhistani space program. This discovery of course meant that Hilts and Ives were not the first men on the Moon, but rather the first men to reach the Moon and return safely to Earth.

The North Point Sea Command subsequently made ten more Orion missions to the Moon, with Orion-16 being the only unsuccessful mission (exploding on the launch pad and resulting in the deaths of all three astronauts). There are rumors that North Point placed an anti-ballistic missile laser weapon on the Moon, but this remains highly classified.