Commercial moon mining to start in 2014

Officials at Astrobotic Technology in Oakland have planned an ambitious schedule to launch one robot to the lunar surface each year starting in 2013, David Gump, company president, told Mike Cronin writing for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Astrobotic's planned 2014 mission consists of a robot that would use a circular bucket wheel and a large bin to collect lunar soil for the inaugural attempt to mine the moon at its south pole, said Chris Skonieczny, Astrobotic's principal researcher and a CMU doctoral candidate in robotics.

The American private sector is not sitting out the next race to the moon; it is creating it. The first privately owned and operated lunar rover will be a new benchmark for free enterprise and capitalism. In the next quarter-of-a-century, we will come know a two-world system, as this Blogger has noted previously in The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.).