This rocket is designed to serve as a reusable lander for NASA's Gateway moon station. A variant of the regular Starship, SpaceX's HLS Lunar Lander is a concept proposed for NASA's 2024 Moon Landing. Replica Lander Rocket Reusable Mobile Friendly.
![]() Typing at an angle feels better for my hands, and you can easily change that angle by adjusting the keyboard’s feet. The split layout lets me type with my shoulders in a more open position. I’ve used two keyboards with layouts similar to the Moonlander as my daily drivers before — ZSA’s ErgoDox EZ and Kinesis’ Advantage 2 — and it still took me a couple weeks to feel fully comfortable on the Moonlander.But now that I’m used to it, I am a huge fan of everything nontraditional about the Moonlander’s design. If you’re coming from a more standard keyboard layout to the Moonlander, it’s probably going to feel strange to type on at first.You’re almost certainly going to go through a potentially weeks-long adjustment period until you’re typing at full speed. But for someone who is thinking about making the Moonlander their first ergonomic keyboard, you might want to consider a more affordable option to see if you even like using this kind of keyboard.Let’s get this out of the way first: yes, the Moonlander, with its split layout, tented angles, and the clusters of keys designed to be used by your thumbs, just doesn’t look much like a traditional keyboard. And then there’s the Moonlander’s price: an eye-watering $365 to start.If you want one of the best ergonomic keyboards available, and you’re willing to pay for the amount of customization it offers, I’d say the Moonlander is worth that steep price. ![]() I thought I’d use the big red keys at the top of the thumb cluster, but for me, they’re just out of reach to be comfortable to use in regular typing. (More on that programmability later.) The angle of the thumb cluster can also be adjusted, though you’ll have to loosen it with an included hex key. Photo by Jay Peters / The VergeI love the thumb clusters, which I’ve programmed for common keys like space, backspace, and enter. The Moonlander at my preferred angle. (Folding up the wrist rests also makes the keyboard fit nicely in the included carrying case.) And if you want, you can take the wrist rests off entirely. But I should say that even though the keyboard feels good ergonomically for me, everybody’s hands and needs are different, so I can’t guarantee that it will be a perfect fit for you, even with how adjustable it is.The keyboard comes with integrated wrist rests, but you can fold them out of the way, where they cleverly attach magnetically to the underside of the keyboard. You can also order switches from ZSA separately, if you’d like. Photo by Jay Peters / The VergeWhen you order a Moonlander from ZSA, you can pick from 10 different key switches: two types of Cherry-manufactured switches (brown and blue) and eight types of Kailh-manufactured switches (bronze, gold, silver, copper, box brown, box red, box white, and box black). The right one has a slightly more fun purpose that I’ll explain later.What’s under the key switches. Lunar Lander Games Software Steps InPhoto by Jay Peters / The VergeThis is where the Moonlander’s software steps in — you can pick where all those keys go yourself. (You can also buy keys with just the line on ZSA’s website in batches of 10.) Using your own keycaps with the thumb cluster requires less common sizing — the six rectangular keys use 1.5u keycaps and the two big red buttons use 2u keycaps — which might make it harder to find custom caps if you want to customize the keyboard.The left side of the keyboard. I loved the clicky bronzes (which are also known as thick golds), I just wished they were a little quieter.If you want to outfit the keyboard in your own keycaps, you can use 1u keycaps for the 64 main keys on the board. The silvers were a linear switch that felt too mushy for me. ZSA also sent me samples of Kailh silver and bronze switches to try. Backspace is one key over from that one. It places the space bar in the left thumb cluster on the left-most key. Check out the default layout, from ZSA’s online configurator tool. You just have to know where to look for it. You can also set different layers of entirely different layouts, which you can swap to by, yes, customizing keys on your keyboard.All this doesn’t mean that out of the box, you won’t be able to hit the spacebar. But you can also set macros, and not just one per key: if you want, you can set up to four different macros per key, depending on combinations of tapping and holding the key. My editor suggested I set macros to mute and end Zoom meetings, which I added promptly. (This doesn’t work perfectly — I’m sure my colleagues have wondered why I sometimes just type the letter “v” in Slack.) I made a separate layer that’s designed almost exclusively to make it easier to watch YouTube videos, with arrow keys under the WASD keys, one-key shortcuts to speed up and slow down videos, and easy access to the volume controls. For example, I can press and hold X, C, and V to perform cut, copy, and paste, respectively. But over time, I kept tweaking my layout to add a few more advanced shortcuts thanks to macros. I’m a Colemak typist, so I had to remap many letter keys just so that I could type words. The main layer of the default Moonlander layout.My layout is much different. Sometimes, my imagined improvements were hilariously off-base. And if I really wanted to, I could find a way to put media controls on my main layer.Getting my Moonlander to work exactly the way I wanted took about two weeks of near-daily tweaks, though. The MacBook Air has an advantage with its function row, which lets me raise or lower volume with just one keystroke — on my Moonlander setup, it takes two because I have to switch to my dedicated layer — but it’s only a minor disadvantage that I’ve gotten used to. And I’ve noticed that I’m just not as efficient when I’m typing on the “normal” keyboard on my MacBook Air, especially when I can’t do my handy press-and-hold shortcuts. The red keys indicate keys that have multiple functions.At this point I would find it hard to live without my current layout on the Moonlander, especially for my day-to-day work. Microsoft access for mac student downloadIt’s a perfectly functional keyboard right out of the box, and I’m sure you could get used to it in time. Fortunately, once you’ve decided on a layout, actually implementing it is speedy, as it only takes a minute or two to download and flash it to the keyboard.And to be fair, you don’t need to customize the Moonlander within an inch of its life like I have. There were a couple times early on where I’d spend upward of half an hour after work putting together new ideas. Trying to nail where the Mac’s Command key should go was a puzzle as well, and my solution to put it on the keys closest to the thumb clusters still feels imperfect. I was stumped for days trying to figure out the “best” way to replicate an inverted T arrow key layout, and eventually, I gave up, keeping two arrow keys on each side of the keyboard but in a slightly different position from the default.
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