Nasa to pay company $1 to collect moon rocks
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Nasa is paying a company $1 to collect moon rocks after it was accepted as a winning bidder.
On Thursday Colorado-based Lunar Outpost was awarded a contract to collect moon dirt for the US space agency.
It is one of three contracts awarded by Nasa under its low-cost lunar resource collection programme.
The other winning bidders were California-based Masten Space Systems and Tokyo-based ispace.
Nasa will be paying the companies for individual collections of lunar regolith, or moon soil, between 50g and 500g in weight.
“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.
“The plan is for the mission to take place in 2023, but we are working with several different lander companies, which could result in an earlier launch date,” Lunar Outpost CEO Justin Cyrus told the BBC.
Lunar