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Private Company Plans To Bring Moon Rocks Back To Earth In Three Years (arstechnica.com)
mi writes: Moon Express, founded in 2010 to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE, says it is self-funded to begin bringing kilograms of lunar rocks back to Earth within about three years. "We absolutely intend to make these samples available globally for scientific research, and make them available to collectors as well," said Bob Richards, one of the company's founders, in an interview with Ars. From the report: "The privately held company released plans for a single, modular spacecraft that can be combined to form successively larger and more capable vehicles. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon."
Futurama already did it.
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Moon rocks are nothing compared to the giant cock eggs cdreimer can squeeze out of his meaty dick.
Bring one of the Apollo11 Hasselblads back instead. That should fetch some coin.
“We absolutely intend to make these samples available globally for scientific research, and make them available to collectors as well,”
If you have a legitimate Research need, Moon Rocks aren't exactly difficult to get hold of. We got a chunk, weighing about a gram, to go into a Low Background Counting Facility for a couple of weeks, to look for anything unusual. We didn't find anything, not even any slightly greasy Solar Atoms, not even any slightly unusual... Elements. Yes, we had to send it back to NASA.
Convince the Chinese that crushed moon rock will give them an erection.
We'll have a moon base next year
The moon rocks should go well with my fidget spinner collection!
Crashing the Moon into the Earth one small rock at a time, expending endless combustion gasses into the atmospheres of Earth and the Moon, and starting a bidding war for lunar artifacts until the bottom falls out of the market.
How long before we reach Peak Moon?
or we might get a permanent crescent moon
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
good news, everyone!
I rocked your mothers gash last night
Getting some lunar dust back as well would be nice, as nasa needs this thing to research their landers etc.. and the artificial thing is not as good.
This is fascinating to me, not so much for what we might learn about the Moon's composition as for the economic implications of marketing "rare" Moon rocks.
Of course they're not intrinsically rare. There's enough Moon for everybody to have too much Moon. What's rare, currently, is the ability to get it there.
This leads me to some questions. If we can effectively model the supply and demand for this material, and the pricing, we might be able to use the model to determine the best way for this company (or a cartel of companies) to constrain the supply of Moon rocks for the purpose of extracting maximum value from fools who want the prestige of owning Moon rocks.
It's a crass way to fund science and exploration, but maybe it could buy us some real funding. Eventually it could move down-market, with millions of certified Moon rocks being sold at places like the gift shop in the Air and Space museum, with little cert cards explaining how $1 of your purchase funds NASA or something.
A great episode of the Outer Limits - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5JdOnIUYhQ
[let's] do what we must
because we can
For the good of all of us.
The ultimate pet rock.
Quote for: Looker (1981)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
"John Reston: Television can control public opinion more effectively than armies of secret police, because television is entirely voluntary. The American government forces our children to attend school, but nobody forces them to watch T.V. Americans of all ages *submit* to television. Television is the American ideal. Persuasion without coercion. Nobody makes us watch. Who could have predicted that a *free* people would voluntarily spend one fifth of their lives sitting in front of a *box* with pictures? Fifteen years sitting in prison is punishment. But 15 years sitting in front of a television set is entertainment. And the average American now spends more than one and a half years of his life just watching television commercials. Fifty minutes, every day of his life, watching commercials. Now, that's power."
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"The United States has it's own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way. With the Nazis it was funded by the government, but in the United States, it's funded by corporations and corporations they only want things to happen that will make people want to buy stuff. So whatever that is, then that is considered okay and good, but that doesn't necessarily mean it really serves people's thinking - it can stupify and make not very good things happen."
- Crispin Glover: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm000...
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"It's only logical to assume that conspiracies are everywhere, because that's what people do. They conspire. If you can't get the message, get the man." - Mel Gibson (from an interview)
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director
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"The real reason for the official secrecy, in most instances, is not to keep the opposition (the CIA's euphemistic term for the enemy) from knowing what is going on; the enemy usually does know. The basic reason for governmental secrecy is to keep you, the American public, from knowing - for you, too, are considered the opposition, or enemy - so that you cannot interfere. When the public does not know what the government or the CIA is doing, it cannot voice its approval or disapproval of their actions. In fact, they can even lie to your about what they are doing or have done, and you will not know it. As for the second advantage, despite frequent suggestion that the CIA is a rogue elephant, the truth is that the agency functions at the direction of and in response to the office of the president. All of its major clandestine operations are carried out with the direct approval of or on direct orders from the White House. The CIA is a secret tool of the president - every president. And every president since Truman has lied to the American people in order to protect the agency. When lies have failed, it has been the duty of the CIA to take the blame for the president, thus protecting him. This is known in the business as "plausible denial." The CIA, functioning as a secret instrument of the U.S. government and the presidency, has long misused and abused history and continues to do so."
- Victor Marchetti, Propaganda and Disinformation: How the CIA Manufactures History
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George Carlin:
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corpora
I think a read a book about this already. Written by Robert Heinlein, if I recall correctly. It didn't turn out so well sending all the moon rocks to Earth. Be careful!
Build a mass driver on the Moon. Use it to fling rocks back to the Earth. Just watch out that you are not under them when they arrive.
Alien bacterial infection FTW!
Requiem for the American Dream
ProTip footnote: use of Aluminium foil hats is not recommended because Alzheimer's.
Requiem for the American Dream
Just don't bring back any of the Moon Spiders!
the US Government believes all moon rocks are their property and aggressively pursue everyone who has one. SWAT teams and FBI sting operations -- for people who were *given* a tiny piece of moon rock by NASA 40 years ago.
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ops or any of the ovEr the same
Turn over the moon rock and find a "Made in China" sticker on back.
standpoint, i don't aNd executes a slings are limited,
I don't have any funding, or a launch vehicle, or a landing vehicle, or a return vehicle, but I have plans.
They fired all their engineers when they moved to Florida from California. *Who* is building this wonderful piece of technology? Seriously: they haven't launched anything, but in 3 years they'll be bringing samples back from the moon, and a year after that have a base?
I don't think that slowly moving mass away from the moon to earth is a good idea in the long run. It'll take a century or two but eventually we'll end up messing up its orbit.