Taiwan Building Lunar Lander For NASA Moon-Mining Mission (blastingnews.com)

MarkWhittington quotes a report from Blasting News: According to AFP, the Chung-shan Institute of Science and Technology in Taiwan is building a $47 million, 3.7 metric ton lunar lander on behalf of NASA. The vehicle is designed to carry a rover called Resource Prospector, which would roll about the lunar surface searching out deposits of oxygen, hydrogen, and water. The Resource Prospector mission is still being formulated but is envisioned to be a joint project with several national space agencies and commercial companies. The lunar lander is the first vehicle of its type to be built in Taiwan. "The Resource Prospector would take samples from about a meter beneath the lunar surface and then heat them in an oven to ascertain what the materials are that comprise it," reports Blasting News. The mission is part of the second stage to NASA's Journey to Mars program called "Proving Ground." "Should the Resource Prospector prove to be successful, the moon could be used as a base for space journeys into Mars," says Han Kuo-change, the head of CSIST's international cooperation program.

Comments

Re:if there is real competition is space ....

[SharpFang]

It's not so simple: the initial investment is huge, and the returns are slow. It takes a visionary (like Musk), with a bottomless well of cash (like Tesla Motors) to enter the playfield. There are safer investments with higher and faster returns if one has that kind of money, and wants to multiply it. Without the "vision" it's simply not going to happen - corporations prefer easy, immediate profits over multi-decade investments, and the asian ones are more conservative that way than the western ones.

For this to happen, it takes a special kind of person in a leadership position. This *might* happen, but I don't see any candidate currently.