First Commercial Moon Mission Approved

dorantrist writes "A Discovery Channel article that The U.S. Government has just licensed the first commercial mission to the moon to TransOrbital, Inc.. Part of the mission is "to VERIFY Apollo and other landing sites" because there are still a few people out there who believe the Apollo program was a hoax. --Maybe they can also pickup the golf balls left by Alan Shepard?"

Who "owns" the moon, anyway?

[rberton]

I wanna know what right the US has to grant commercial missions to the moon. Like we are the only country that has rights to the moon as a resource.

The next big wars will be over space shipping lanes.

riley

Golf balls?

[Lumpy]

Maybe they can also pickup the golf balls left by Alan Shepard?

dont have to..... take a look here [irtc.org] or more specifically this [irtc.org] animation.

Re:Who "owns" the moon, anyway?

[Kaz Riprock]

We didn't have to let them take off from our airspace.

You didn't...

[Moderation abuser]

"Trailblazer is expected to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan within the next nine to 12 months. "

So, WTF does it have to do withthe US government?

Re:Who "owns" the moon, anyway?

[stratjakt]

What sort of jurisdiction does the UN have over the moon to settle the matter? The moon isn't a member nation, I didn't bother to see if the US was a signatory in its goofy 'moon rules'

I think the old-timey notion of 'we got here first' applies to the moon, so far as the moon as a piece of real estate.

btw, my favorite part of the UN agreement is:

"All activities on the moon, including its exploration and use, shall be carried out in accordance with ... Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations."

Sure! Because we dont want to piss off the moon people!

Who sez the UN is a waste of time?

Permission

[Restil]

It's not so much a matter of getting permission, but to inform people of what's going on. MOST launches are at least announced, since especially in this day and age, you don't want to launch off rockets without informing anyone. Jittery governments who are in the dark might think its the start of a nuclear attack. This HAS happened in the past. We don't care that you launch rockets, we just want to make sure they're going into space and not somewhere else.

Its also important that if something goes wrong with the spacecraft and all contact is lost, the craft (or debris from it) can be tracked by those who are most concerned about such things. A single screw in low earth orbit can cause major havoc if it impacts a spacecraft. You want to know where it is.

The other issue is to insure compliance with any international treaties with regards to propulsion systems or use of celestial bodies for which someone at one point in time might have signed a treaty for. True, they could launch the rocket anyway, and probably nobody could do much about it. But there's no sense pissing anyone off if a yes answer is overwhelmingly probable anyway.

-Restil

Re:Moon as "national park"?

[Catbeller]

There wouldn't be any strip mines. The moon doesn't appear to have layers of strata that require removal of the surface to access.

The surface *is* the material we want: metallic oxides, rich in yummy aluminum, titanium, iron and O2.

To mine it, you merely scoop it up into a truck.

As for marring the beauty of the surface, the moon has none to speak of. It looks like Verdun after WW I.

I'm all for preserving natural beauty on earth, and mining the moon for material would be great help in reducing mining on earth. As far as I'm concerned, the moon is a lovely resource.

You could not see the activities on the moon from Earth anyway, not without a major scope. You'd never notice a thing.

There's nothing ALIVE on the moon, so we should use it.

I think life appearing on a dead world would spruce it up a bit.

Re:Arrogant Conquerors?

[mikewas]

You don't own it until you "improve" it. That is have permanent residents living there without significant outside assistance. This rule of international law has applied to everything from continents (e.g. Australia) to homesteads (e.g. some company wanted land in the US west, or rather the oil under it, and sued for the government to take it away from the homesteader since he hadn't built a good enough cabin and hadn't cleared land for a garden -- they only lost because of a statute of limitations issue).

The next step is bulldozing everything in sight -- so when you look up at night and notice that all the peaks have been flattened and all the craters have been filled in, then you'll know that somebody really owns it!

Re:Verify?

[macdaddy357]

You can't take the people who think the moon landing is a hoax up to hubble and make them look. They don't belive hubble exists. If you could magnify the moons surface enough to show them through a land-based telescope, they would say you rigged it. People who think the moon landings were a hoax believe it as a religion. There is just no proving to someone that their beliefs are nonsense.

Re:Why does this company have to get US permission

[The Grey Mouser]

Why does this company need to get approval of the US Gov?

Consider that there are literally thousands of satellites presently in low-earth orbit, some functional, some merely centimeter-sized pieces of debris. Much of this is being tracked by US Air Defense, and orbital elements for spy sats are not generally made public, for obvious reasons.

So, it is likely that these folks submitted a mission plan and trajectory to the US, which then returned it to them and said "that should work fine, have fun". They were not "getting permission to leave the planet", they were getting a go-ahead to help keep their moon shuttle from an accidental collision with either an unregistered spysat or the odd bit of space junk as they pass through LEO. This has been common practice for many years now.

Cheers,

Mouser

Apollo Historical Site

[jmoriarty]

Personally, I'd like to see the Apollo landing site declared an International Historical Site. As the man said, it was a giant leap for all of mankind, and I'd like to see it preserved as-is.

Yes, I know this mission is just going to take pictures, but sooner or later someone (Chinese? Bill Gates?) is going to once again land on the moon, and could casually destroy a significant part of mankind's history.

Re:Moon as "national park"?

[Tackhead]

> Am I the only person disturbed by the idea that people will go to the moon and strip mine with abandon, and destroy its beauty from the perspective of people on Earth?

Unfortunately, no.

> I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when people look up and see lights all over the moon at night and they've dug up the man in the moon's face... ;)

I think something will never be the same about our little neighborhood of space when a wandering asteroid extinguishes the lights all over the Earth at night.

I worry about people like you - who would have the only creatures that can make lights like that imprisoned and vulnerable on Earth, rather than busily making more lights on the Moon, Mars, or on near-Earth asteroids.

If people like you carry the day, all of those lights will go out at the same time. And then, our little neighborhood of space won't be the same at all.

Re:Commercial uses ?

[mr_teem]

So Transorbital has gotten permission (whyever) for sending up a single probe that will a) take detailed pictures, b) drop a "time capsule" on the moon and c) collect lots of telemetry useful to space scientists. The first probably has a market--a detailed lunar atlas would be pretty neat and the other pictures would sell. The second pays for the trip itself but doesn't produce anything of value so it's just a sink for my disposable income. :-) And the third I'm assuming exists but there probably isn't much reason to talk about it--it isn't sexy enough.

Future plans involve dropping navigation beacons? Okay--so they've got a map and beacons. They could sell those to anyone who wants the information. They have a few other one-way craft planned, too [transorbital.net].

But commercial uses have to make money. The first commercial use would have to be mining. But that only works if it is cheaper to shove equipment up the gravity well and catch it on the way down than digging somewhere on Earth. Anything else is way too expensive today. Maybe that's changing and Transorbital is betting that it is.

Re:Why does this company have to get US permission

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I think other posters have already explained that [slashdot.org] very well, so I won't repeat that here.

But talking about the satellite and orbits issue, it may be interesting but bear in mind that orbital elements or ephemeredes are only valid for a certain amount of time after they are issued (up to a few weeks); this is due to the effects of things like atmospheric drag, orbital corrections and the alike. This is particularly true for low-orbit satellites like ISS [nasa.gov] and the Space Shuttle [nasa.gov] (when in orbit, off course)

Specially interesting, see here [heavens-above.com] a chart of the orbital height of the International Space Station over time. Quite interesting chart.

Settle it once and for all

[Anonymous Coward]

They should leave something huge on the moon as prove that they were there and tell people how to find it with higher end telescopes to show us that somebody has indeed stepped on the moon.

Maybe they could leave a large colored sheet that would be visible from Earth.