Private moon mission rumour is glimpse of lunar future

Is the moon open for business? That's the prospect raised by rumours that a private firm is aiming to send astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Cryptic tweets and posts from the websites NASASpaceFlight.com and NASA Watch, neither of which is affiliated with NASA, said former NASA astronauts and engineers would soon announce such a venture.

This led various bloggers to single out the company Golden Spike. It is registered in Colorado to Alan Stern, a former administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, and now working on the New Horizons Pluto mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Golden Spike has not revealed its plans, and Stern told New Scientist that he "can't comment either way" on the purported mission.

Private niche

However, there may be a niche for a private crewed moon venture, says Fred Bourgeois, head of Team Frednet, a competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize race to land a rover on the moon.

Although Space Adventures, a company backed by film director James Cameron, announced in 2005 that it wants to send tourists to the moon, it has no suitable craft as yet. Meanwhile Open Luna, an open-source effort, lacks cash.

NASA and China have vague plans to return astronauts to the moon. But Bourgeois says private players will do it more cheaply. For example, Scaled Composites became the first commercial outfit to send a human into sub-orbital space in 2004, winning the Ansari X Prize, and it spent only a third of what it would have cost a state-supported aerospace organisation, according to a source from the X Prize Foundation.

Commercial missions will also help establish the moon as a new frontier, which is important for humanity's development, Bourgeois says. "If we're not going up and out, we're going to fall back in on ourselves."

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