Private company plans to bring Moon rocks back to Earth in three years
After several years of secrecy, a company called Moon Express revealed the scope of its ambitions on Wednesday. And they are considerable. The privately held company released plans for a single, modular spacecraft that can be combined to form successfully larger and more capable vehicles. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Moon Express says it is self-funded to begin bringing kilograms of lunar rocks back to Earth within about three years. “We absolutely intend to make these samples available globally for scientific research, and make them available to collectors as well,” said Bob Richards, one of the company’s founders, in an interview with Ars.
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Value of Moon rocks
How much are lunar rocks worth? Quite a lot. NASA has never sold any of the 842 pounds of lunar material its six Apollo missions returned from the Moon. However, in 1970, the Soviet Union launched the robotic Luna 16 mission, which succeeded in returning 101 grams of material from the surface of the Moon. A fraction of this material made it to the open market.
In 1993, Sotheby’s auctioned off 0.2 grams of these Soviet rocks in three holders (each with a magnifying glass to see the specs of lunar dust). This auction raised $442,500 in total, and is the only data point we have for the value of material returned directly to Earth from the Moon, said Robert Pearlman editor of the space history site CollectSpace.com.
Another data point may come later this month, on July 20, when Sotheby’s auctions off the outer protective bag used by Neil Armstrong during Apollo 11 for the first sample of lunar rock collected on the Moon. That material was put in an inner bag, which was then stored in this outer decontamination bag. The outer bag has some specs of lunar dust on it, and is likely to fetch $2-$4 million. “I don’t think Moon Express will have any trouble finding a market,” Pearlman said.
(Moon Express co-founder and chairman Naveen Jain happily let his imagination riff on possible Moon rock applications when we talked with him earlier this spring: “The Moon has been a symbol of love for hundreds of generations,” Jain said. “‘Everyone gives someone a diamond, if you love someone enough, you give them the Moon.”)
Successfully demonstrating missions to the lunar surface could pay off in another way for Moon Express, too. Likely sometime this fall, NASA will issue a “Request for Proposals” from companies to help the agency in its efforts to determine how accessible water is at the lunar poles, and whether it could be easily turned into rocket propellant. If—and yes, this remains a big if—Moon Express has a working architecture by late this year or early 2018, something which no other company or country has, it could turn into a large government contract.
Read more at Ars Technica