NASA is soliciting proposals for scientific instruments that might reveal answers about lunar resources that could support the agency’s journey to Mars. NASA would sponsor the instruments to fly on a lunar orbiter designed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). The spacecraft, the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), is scheduled to launch in December …Read More
August 3, 2016 – The U.S. Government has made a historic ruling to allow the first private enterprise, Moon Express, Inc. (MoonEx), permission to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and land on the Moon in 2017. This breakthrough U.S. policy decision provides authorization to Moon Express for a maiden flight of its robotic spacecraft onto the …Read More
Moon Express, Inc. (MoonEx) announced today that it has reached an agreement with the U.S. Air Force 45th Wing to license the historic Space Launch Complexes 17 and 18 at Cape Canaveral for its lunar lander development and flight test operations. The announcement was made by company founder & CEO Bob Richards in a keynote …Read More
This rover could be the first robot to mine for resources on another world! Targeted for launch in the early 2020s, Resource Prospector (RP) will take a short trip from Earth to the moon, where it will use a suite of rover-hosted instruments to search and characterize sub-surface water, hydrogen and other volatiles. Further, RP …Read More
Today, Moon Express made history as the first private space company to request the U.S government to conduct a payload review of its spacecraft and plans leading to regulatory approval of a commercial mission to the Moon in 2017. Moon Express initiated the review process through a submission to the Federal Aviation Administration Office of …Read More
Resource Prospector (RP) is an In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) capability demonstration mission currently planned to launch in 2020. Expanding human presence beyond low-Earth orbit to asteroids and Mars will require the maximum possible utilization of local materials — so-called in-situ resources. RP aims to be the first mission to validate prospecting, extraction, and analysis of …Read More
Can our moon help fuel an energy-hungry Earth? Work is in progress to build equipment that can demonstrate the extraction of helium-3 (3He)–helium with two protons and one neutron–and other volatiles from the moon’s resource-rich soil known as regolith. Volatiles are chemical elements and chemical compounds with low boiling points; the moon is a treasure-trove …Read More
In what scientists say signals a paradigm shift in interplanetary science, NASA has selected a shoebox-size mission to search for water ice and other resources from above the surface of the moon. Called Lunar IceCube, the mission is one of several public-private partnerships chosen under NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Broad Agency …Read More