NASA Mulling Joint Lunar Missions With Commercial Enterprises

MarkWhittington writes "According to a July 3, 2013 story in SpaceRef, NASA has issued a Request for Information concerning various commercial endeavors to create robotic lunar landers. NASA appears to be interested in assisting in those projects with a view of using the resulting vehicles for its own exploration plans. Officially, thanks to a mandate by President Obama, NASA is not planning its own crewed mission to the moon. However the space agency seems to be interested in supporting, in some way, a commercially run lunar base. Joint robotic lunar landings might be seen as the start of such an effort."

Comments

We need to go to space, because space is COOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

ITT, space nutters whine about:

• An asteroid could hit the Earth and kill us all, so we need to spend billions of dollars on sending humans to the moon
• If you don't support a manned mission to the moon, you're anti-science and hate all the inventions that have come about because of the space program, such as Tang
• All the problems on Earth have been solved, so now we need to go visit the stars
• Obama