Slashdot Mirror
Moon Express Unveils Next Moon Lander
Velcroman1 writes "A U.S. spacecraft hasn't made a controlled landing on the moon since Apollo 17 left the lunar surface on Dec. 14, 1972. That's about to change. Moon Express will unveil the MX-1 spacecraft at the Autodesk University show in Las Vegas Thursday evening — a micro-spacecraft that will in 2015 mark the first U.S. 'soft' landing since the days of the Apollo program, FoxNews.com has learned. The craft looks for all the world like a pair of donuts wearing an ice cream cone, and the tiny vehicle clearly isn't big enough for a human being. But it is big enough to scoop up some rocks and dirt, store them in an internal compartment, and return it to Earth. After all, the moondirt Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin once trod holds a king's ransom of titanium, platinum, and other rare elements. Moon Express plans to mine it."
Nice Slashvert for a "company" that has no hope in hell of doing anything near "mining the moon", though I'm sure that between grants and people that want to lose their money, the "leadership" will do very well for themselves. Seriously, these people are going to *try* and land a small beacon on the moon, and this is some proof of concept that they can mine valuable resources and fly them back? In any case, the Chinese are well on their way to this goal with both the technical knowledge to get there and the moo-la to do it first and claim most of the surface, long before these people figure out how to turn a small immobile beacon with an inner-tube for landing gear, into a machine that can mine resources and return them to Earth. Seriously, sounds like an MIT engineering grad student project, putting it in the same frame as Apollo 17 is a stretch.
But it is big enough to scoop up some rocks and dirt, store them in an internal compartment, and return it to Earth.
Return to Earth? Sure it will. And if it does, with what? A pound if that? Even a few pounds? Again, the Chinese will be there shuvelling ore into huge return crafts way before - er - long after these people move on to some other grad school project.
I'm thinking we need a new version of Godwin's Law, whereby the first person to make an unprovoked (indeed totally unconnected) claim that someone is an Ayn Rand disciple automatically loses.
Can someone tell me how the parent gets from the GP to vomiting on a pathetic Ayn Rand Coo Coo face?