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NASA has announced that it is looking for private companies to go to the Moon and collect dust and rocks from the surface and bring them back to Earth.
The US space agency would buy the lunar samples in quantities between 50 and 500 grams for between $ 15,000 and $ 25,000.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Thursday that the collection of lunar material would become part of a technology development program that would help astronauts “live off the ground” for future manned missions to the moon or in other places.
Bridenstine wrote that the agency “You are buying lunar soil from a commercial supplier. It is time to establish regulatory certainty to extract and exchange space resources. “
The collection is part of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, established last year to get American astronauts, including the first woman and the next man, to the moon by 2024.
The agency has indicated that missions further afield, to Mars, for example, will require the use of locally mined resources.
“We will use what we learn on and around the Moon to take the next giant leap: send astronauts to Mars,” Bridenstine wrote.
In a blog post, Bridenstine said the effort would comply with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says no country can claim sovereign the moon or other celestial bodies in the same way that the Antarctic continent is off-limits to the territorial conquest. .
In May, NASA released a legal framework that would govern the behavior of countries and companies in space and on the Moon. The legal framework, known as the Artemis Accords, includes the creation of “safety zones” around sites where mining and exploration would take place on the lunar surface.
The chief administrator of NASA also said in a forum organized by the Safe World Foundation that the policies that will govern the mining of celestial bodies would be very similar to those that currently exist for the world’s oceans.
“We believe that we can extract and use the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and use tuna from the ocean,” he said, without referring to the overfishing and pollution that is rapidly destroying fish populations in many regions.
However, unlike fisheries, participating celestial mining companies would have to provide images of the material and the location from which it was recovered.
NASA already has a separate program to hire companies to carry science experiments and cargo to the moon before a human landing. These include Astrobotic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp, and Lockheed Martin.
Bridenstine said that he anticipated that some of them might also be interested in lunar mining.
Casey Dreier, Senior Advocate and Senior Advisor for Space Policy at the Planetary Society, wrote on Twitter that the importance of NASA’s announcement is “not so much the financial incentive (which is miniscule) but in setting the legal precedent that private companies can collect and sell celestial materials (with the explicit blessing of NASA / United States government United)”.
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