This crowdfunded lunar mission wants to send your selfies to the moon

[Shawn Knight]

In what is being described by its creators as the most inspirational lunar project since the Apollo landings, a new Kickstarter project aims to send an unmanned robotic landing module to an unexplored area of the moon.

The ambitious project gets better, however, as Lunar Missions Ltd plans to drill down to a depth of at least 20 meters and potentially as deep as 100 meters. Once complete, the spacecraft will bury a digital time capsule in the hole which should be preserved for roughly a billion years due to the conditions at the South Pole of the moon.

The primary goal of the mission isn’t to send selfies and poems to space but rather to learn more about the origins of our closest celestial body. The digital time capsule is just one of the ways the company plans to fund the endeavor.

As of writing, the UK-based Kickstarter has already raised nearly half of its £600,000 funding goal. The campaign is no doubt capitalizing on the renewed interest in space exploration brought about by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe. Said probe put a robotic lander named Philae on a comet last week following a 10-year journey through space.

A minimum pledge of £60 is all that’s needed to get space in the digital time capsule. Of course, don’t expect to see the mission take off anytime soon as the Kickstarter description says they’ll be raising funds for the next 10 years.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/58906-crowdfunded-lunar-mission-wants-send-selfies-moon.html

 

[H3rmit]

Im glad people understand that NASA is a joke and that if we are going to learn as much as possible about space we got to do it our self. even if nasa did do it the info of what they found would never see the light of day.

 

[Uncle Al]

Ahhhhh come on and be fair! NASA creates some of the best bottle rockets we've seen this year and what they can't build, the fund somebody else to!

Honestly, in the early days NASA was tremendous. They took a presidential challenge to heart and pulled this nation together better than anyone else could have. If we had a president that had the vision raw courage that Kennedy had, just imagine where we would be today.

Besides, if they need to get a selfie now days, all they need is to get on that Russian web site .... they got plenty of them; probably yours too!

 

[dividebyzero]

Ten year wait? I'd suggest that if exploration of a desolate and lifeless environment are the criteria, EverBank Field is a whole lot closer and cheaper. It's not as if the time capsule would be crushed under the weight of expectation.

 

[captaincranky]

These "crowd sourced projects", are the "squeegee men" of the tech industry .

Some days you just want to drive home in peace, without some a****** trying to clean your windshield, have a bucket shoved in you face for some megalomaniac preacher's shelter, (which happens to be in another state), or some 9 year old pounding on a pair of snare drums, without rhyme, reason, or rhythm, collecting for some nameless drum line scam.

Them's the facts of, "grass roots crowd sourced funding". Now excuse me while I roll up my window, and flip a few people the bird...