As NASA announced the Lunar Prospector’s discovery of polar ice on the Moon, Applied Space Resources, Inc. (ASR) of Long Island, New York said the robotic sample return
mission it is currently engineering will provide a proof of concept
for low-cost commercial lunar sample retrieval missions.
ASR’s
lunar sample return mission, the Lunar Retriever, will retrieve
lunar rock and soil to sell both to research organizations and,
through commercial channels, to the general public. ASR expects to
launch Lunar Retriever by September 2000, the 30th anniversary of
Luna 16, the first robotic sample return mission to soft land on
the moon. “Based on the spacecraft designed for the Lunar
Retriever mission, a follow-on mission to retrieve lunar soil and
ice samples could be launched within six to twelve months after the
initial mission at a cost well under $100 million,” says Denise
Norris, ASR’s CEO.
When passed, the Commercial Space Act of 1997 will specifically
instruct NASA to look to private companies like ASR to develop the
In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) technology critical to its
plans for future space exploration and colonization. And
technology for using the newly-discovered lunar ice would give
space exploration an immense boost. Water is critical to human
life support, and can also be separated into its chemical
components of hydrogen and oxygen: oxygen for breathing, and
combinations of hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. But the cost
of lifting the thousands of gallons of water into low Earth orbit
alone, much less transporting it from there to the Moon, would be
prohibitive.
The Lunar Prospector data suggests there is an immense amount of
water on the Moon in the form of ice mixed in with lunar soil. But
before space explorers can make use of the water, scientists and
engineers will have to figure out how best to extract it from the
lunar soil, in which it is sparsely scattered. The Lunar
Prospector’s investigators, Dr. Alan Binder of the Lunar Research
Institute in Gilroy, California and Dr. William Feldman of the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, say the data suggests
that water ice is confined to the polar regions and exists at only
a 0.3 percent to 1 percent mixing ratio in combination with the
rocky lunar soil.
Jay Manifold, ASR’s Vice President of Research and Development,
says, “The key to ISRU development, including research on how to
extract and use lunar ice, is putting samples of lunar resources in
the hands of scientists on Earth. ASR’s goal is to use existing
technologies to deliver spacecraft to any destination with
precision, and return resources and information with equal
precision, for a profit. Our Lunar Retriever, for example, will
use the same Lockheed-Martin Athena 2 rocket as the Lunar
Prospector. A mission to collect samples of lunar polar ice, and
return them in cryogenic storage, would be a logical next step for
us.”
ASR’s principals stress the importance of entrepreneurs to opening
near-Earth space to the resource development that will make
possible fulfilling NASA’s exploration goals. ASR will make its
services available to private and public concerns alike, but will
take no subsidies. “Humankind will only benefit from the resources
of space when they are developed by private enterprises such as
ours,” says Denise Norris. “We intend to use our knowledge,
creativity, hard work and business vision to demonstrate the
viability of market-driven space missions. We will not go to the
public asking them to send us into space. We will go into space
first, then come to the public with something to offer: the
productive utilization of the vast resources of near-Earth space.”
