NASA to pay $1 to collect rocks from moon

Agency: NASA will pay $1 to a company to collect rocks from the moon. NASA awarded Lunar Outpost to collect samples.

It is one of the four contracts awarded by NASA under its low-cost lunar resource collection programme. “The US Space agency will be paying the companies for individual collections of lunar regolith, or moon soil, between 50 gram and 500 gram in weight,” writes BBC.

“The companies will collect the samples and then provide us with visual evidence and other data that they’ve been collected,” a spokesman for Nasa said.

Other bidders who won are Masten Space Systems and Tokyo-based ispace, along with its European subsidiary.

According to BBC, Colorado–based Lunar Outpost, a robotics firm will be paid $1 for collecting moon rocks from the lunar South Pole.

However, the fee is not the motivation for these companies.

Speaking to BBC, space expert Sinead O’ Sullivan said that the innovation here is not of financial value but of creating business and legal norms of creating a market for buyers and sellers outside of Earth’s constraints.