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NASA Mulling Joint Lunar Missions With Commercial Enterprises

Posted by Soulskill on from the fly-me-to-the-moon dept.

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."

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, JPL by demachina · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hey NASA, you heard of this place called JPL out by Cal Tech. They've been landing rovers on Mars for a while now which is WAY harder than landing one on the moon. Why don't you give them a call and stop being clueless and pathetic.

    P.S.

    Elon, please launch Falcon Heavy so we can shut NASA down and put the money in to your actual space program instead of the empty shell that is NASA these days

    --
    @de_machina
    1. Re:Uh, JPL by kermidge · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ....so we can shut NASA down

      Congress would have to revoke their charter, I believe. Senators keep NASA around due to inertia, weather forecasts, the odd bit of national prestige, and contracts to companies from, or doing business in, their states.

    2. Re:Uh, JPL by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      NASA needs to stay around so that when the Chinese land on the moon the US government can go into a panic and pump money into it.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:Public-Private Partnerships by Cenan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There is no technical difference between public, public-private or private - only the implementation detail of how the money winds up in campaign donors' pockets.

    --
    ... whatever ...
  3. Do you know what you are talking about even by Camael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm pretty sure NASA have heard of this JPL since the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech is a NASA laboratory.

    From TFA:

    “A commercial lunar lander jointly developed with NASA would capitalize on NASA's previous investments and expertise in lander technologies. It also would stimulate a commercial capability to deliver payloads to the lunar surface reliably and cost-effectively."

    So how is reaching out to commercial entities to improve their existing know-how instead of relying ONLY on their own labs "being clueless and pathetic"?