In connection with Mitsubishi and Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, privately held LunaCorp planned to send two lunar rovers to the Moon in mid-1999, in part to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's moon landing on July 20, 1969. The company's Lunar Rover Mission was slated to land in the Sea of Tranquillity before making a 1000 kilometer trek that included visits to the Apollo 11, Apollo 17, Surveyor 5 and Ranger 8 sites. The ambitious two-year Moon mission was to include a celebration of the dawning of the new millennium with live images of sunrise on Earth on January 1, 2000.

According to LunaCorp President David Gump, however, the forward-looking mission has been delayed for at least three years. Gump, a marketer, technology consultant and author of Space Enterprise: Beyond NASA, originally envisioned a streamlined NASA-less venture, but admits that money woes have forced LunaCorp to partner with the space agency. In other words, NASA has effectively commandeered the mission. The NASA "rescue" includes the naming of Dr. Alan Binder, a principal investigator for the 1976 Viking mission to Mars, as LunaCorp's project director.

The motivation behind LunaCorp's original mission, said company spokesmen, was to give a measure of control over space exploration to the public. "There is a realization," said LunaCorp VP Jim Dunstan, "that space exploration can no longer be conducted on behalf of the public, but must include public participation." The plan was to allow visitors to the LunaCorp's Lunar Exploration Pavilion to drive the rovers themselves. Freely billed as a boon to private enterprise, the Lunar Rover Mission was likely to involve lavish corporate and television sponsorship of Disneyland proportions.

The delay represents a huge lost marketing opportunity for LunaCorp President David Gump. But, in the eyes of this NASA critic, the specter of space agency participation looms as an even bigger problem. With NASA's trend toward ever growing bureaucracy--and a peculiar lack of interest in investigating the possibility of artificial ruins on Mars--it seems doubtful that the LunaCorp mission will present an opportunity for the public to investigate similar anomalies on the Moon.

In an effort to discover exactly what happened to dash LunaCorp's original bold plans, I contacted David Gump via email in January of 1999. On January 25 he responded promptly with a lengthy email. The message outlined a number of interesting details, a couple of which I discuss next. Though it is unknown whether the space agency intended from the beginning to infiltrate the LunaCorp mission, some of Gump's statements lead me to believe that NASA did play some part in driving LunaCorp to accept its backing, despite Gump's obvious desire to conduct the project independently.

Highlights of Gump's email follow.

An unexpected tripling of rocket launch costs:

"…The "2000" effort turned out to be impossible due to financial reasons….We had budgeted for a relatively cheap Proton launch initially; then the U.S. government and industry taught the Russians the joy of high oligopoly launch prices through the treaty restricting the number of their GEO launches, and the Russians realized they could sell Protons for $75 million instead of $25 million. That jacked up our projected cost…"

An offer by NASA to pay for data acquired from LunaCorp's space activities:

" [Contrary to original goals, in the new, NASA-backed mission,] the majority of the costs are expected to be paid by government agencies (NASA, DOE, DARPA) which would buy data from the polar rover. Only a minority of the costs would be paid by commercial customers."

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My first question is: Did NASA play any part in the Russian "revelation" that resulted in the unanticipated tripling of launch costs? Gump only mentions "the U.S. government and industry," but one assumes that the superpower space agencies keep in close contact. Perhaps NASA has a vested interest in keeping launch costs prohibitive to private industry?

My second question: would NASA's purchase of LunaCorp space data effectively remove it from the public domain by subjecting it to a "validation period"? Presumably, data purchase by a public agency from a private corporation would make the information accessible by the public. On the other hand, purchase of data by the DOE (Department of Energy) or military-minded DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) would probably insure that all such data would be sequestered away, possibly categorized as "classified."

In any case, it will be several years before we see any results from LunaCorp's mission. Depending on NASA's inclination and degree of control over the data, we may not see any of it. The government monopoly on information crucial to the pursuit of evidence of artificiality on the Moon and Mars remains intact.

 

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