Turns out Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” was indeed too small, and everyone and their mother is trying to get back to the moon.
Check out the week’s biggest moon-moves to place your bets on who’ll get there first:
Blue Origin successfully launched and returned a dummy to Earth
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company landed their rocket capsule, New Shepard, for the 7th time yesterday. Its pilot: a test dummy named ‘Mannequin Skywalker.’
While B.O. hopes to reach the moon one day, in the meantime, they’re settling for slingshotting paying customers dozens of miles above Earth at $200k a pop.
Flat-Earthers first, please.
iSpace raises big $$ to get to the moon
In the “largest ever” Series A funding for a commercial space company, the Japanese startup iSpace raised $90.2m to start launching private moon missions by 2020.
The company is creating a cargo transport system for “moon-based operations” and believes the moon will have a population of around 1,000 permanent residents by 2040.
In other words, they’re getting ahead of the future Space Truckin’ market.
President Trump is sending NASA back to the Big Cheese
Thanks to a directive signed on Monday, NASA is headed back to the moon for the first time in 53 years (the mission is set to launch in 2022).
It might seem like an odd move, but returning to the moon could actually to establish an easier path to Mars by creating a moon-orbiting outpost called a Deep Space Gateway — just a little moon rest stop before big red.