Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Mining The Moon

Apparently President Trump is helping this private company get to the moon:

Moon Express, the first private company in history to receive government permission to travel beyond Earth's orbit, announced Tuesday that it raised another $20 million in private equity financing to fund its maiden lunar mission to take place in late 2017. This brings the total amount of private investment to $45 million from investors that include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund and Autodesk.

What may have added impetus to investor interest in Moon Express is President Trump's picks for the NASA transition team - Charles Miller and Chris Shank - and the leading candidate to become the next NASA administrator, GOP Rep. Jim Bridenstine. All support commercial space ventures and manned exploration - including lunar missions.

If successful, the new MX-1 lunar lander from Moon Express would not only win the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE, it would also help jump-start a new era of space exploration. Up until now, only government-funded missions from the United States, China and Russia have landed on the moon.

You can read the rest @
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/31/billionaire-closer-to-mining-moon-for-trillions-of-dollars-in-riches.html

Q: Who will benefit from these riches?

A: Not you and me.

It's not that hard to get to the moon, but bringing back appreciable quantities of anything is not going to be so easy.

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