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The eyebrow-raising contract comes as corporate engagement in the space heats up.
NASA said it will pay a private company $ 1 to collect a sample of the moon as part of its initiative to solicit the help of commercial companies to obtain moon rocks and dust.
The US space agency announced Thursday that it has selected four companies to collect space assets and return them to NASA, including two US companies, a Japanese company, and a Luxembourg-based company.
NASA said one of the US companies, Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colorado, has proposed to collect only a $ 1 fee when returning the samples after its lander arrived on the moon in 2023.
Ispace Japan and Europe are asking $ 5,000 for lunar samples, and Masten Space Systems of California is raising $ 15,000.
Overall, NASA says total contracts with these companies amount to $ 25,001.
The partnership with the private sector for the collection of cosmic samples aims to support NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024.
“These awards expand NASA’s innovative use of public-private partnerships on the Moon. We are thrilled to join our business and international partners to make Artemis the largest and most diverse global human space exploration coalition in history,” said Mike Gold , NASA’s associate administrator agent for international relations and inter-agency, said in a statement.
“Space resources are the fuel that will propel America and all of humanity to the stars,” Gold added.
Phil McAlister, director of commercial space flight development at NASA, added that “leveraging commercial involvement improves our ability to safely return to the moon in a sustainable, innovative and cost-effective way.”
“A supportive policy for the recovery and use of space resources provides a stable and predictable investment environment for commercial space innovators and entrepreneurs,” said McAlister.
The companies are tasked with collecting a small amount of lunar samples from any location on the moon, as well as providing images to NASA of the collected material and data identifying the location. The companies will then have to transfer ownership of the moon rock samples to NASA.
Lunar Outpost said its contract with NASA “means a paradigm shift in the way society thinks about space exploration.”
“As in the first space race, competition for national pride and an innate desire to explore will always play a factor in motivating humanity to push the limits of their expeditionary capabilities,” the company said. “However, this contract symbolizes a new incentive that will exponentially increase the potential of future missions and will be the main economic engine of the New Space economy for decades to come: access to the unlimited and priceless resources of space.”
To fulfill its contract, the Colorado firm said it will use its new rover, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform, to collect lunar samples for NASA. The rover will land on the lunar South Pole in 2023.
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