Playing Tennis on the Moon

I've been having the most vivid dreams as of late, often rather nightmarish, often downright strange, but last night's was pure fun for a change.

For some reason, to commemorate the London 2012 Olympics, the LOCOG people were inviting people to go to an olympics base on the moon for £20. You had to wear black tie for some reason, and of the journey itself, I remembered nothing because "the human mind could not comprehend it." The lunar base itself had no windows - perhaps it was all a Capricorn One type illusion - and was all metallic inside.

I played a game of tennis with a lunar resident, a long legged female tennis player, and despite the low gravity, the game was dead slow, with the tennis balls barely bouncing. I could barely hit the ball over the net. Recognising this disaster, I was invited to play Moon Pool, which involved a triangular table, with holes around the pointy end rather reminiscent of bar billiards. Hanging over the table was a basket ball net, under which was a netting bag filled with fruit and mushrooms. This, apparently, was for "Fruit Basketball".

Fruit Basketball!!! Shades of Zig and Zag.

This has got me wondering however. We are constantly reminded how astronauts on long missions must constantly exercise in order to maintain musculo-skeletal integrity and vascular performance; to this end they spend hours a day in space on boring looking treadmills and similar devices. I remember Skylab had a primitive sort of hand cycling device.

This is just not going to be stimulating enough in the long run - the long mission astronauts of the future will want to play more competitive sports. I figured some sort of variant of squash or handball would be a possible option - doesn't require a huge amount of space, and would probably be enhanced by playing in a weightless situation. Badminton's a non starter, so is volleyball, but no doubt it would still be a spectacular sport for the naturist astronauts of the future. Darts would be cool in zero g, but not very strenuous, and hey, watch those windows and vital systems.

Perhaps you could play ping pong, but in a sort of square tunnel with a net all the way round. That might just work!