You’ve probably seen the rovers, but what about a motorcycle designed for the Moon? Meet the Tardigrade by Hookie Co. Featuring a custom designed chassis, 12-piece Kevlar 3D wheels measuring just under 24-inches in diameter, and a laser-cut aluminum main frame, swingarm as well as fork.
Photo credit: Mahdi Eghbali | Design Boom
NASA aims to land American astronauts back on the Moon by 2024, including the first woman, through the agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program. During future missions, astronauts may stay in a 3D-printed Moon village of sorts, with everything they need, and more.
NASA has chosen Nokia Bell Labs’ to build and deploy the first ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened, end-to-end 4G LTE solution on the lunar surface by late 2022. Nokia is teamping up with Intuitive Machines for this mission to integrate this groundbreaking network into their lunar lander for deployment on the surface, which will then self-configure upon landing, thus establishing the first LTE communications system on the Moon.
Photo credit: Astrobotic via The Verge
NASA is seeking to purchase lunar soil samples from private companies. These companies are not limited to just those in the United States, but from around the world, and the lunar samples requested range from 1.8 ounces to 18 ounces by 2024. The space agency will pay between $15,000 to $25,000 for them, but with one catch, you’ll get the 80% remainder of the money once the soil is delivered. Companies only get 10% after signing the contract and another 10% once the spacecraft launches.
RR Auction’s Space Exploration showcase is an extremely rare slice of a lunar meteorite known as NWA (Northwest Africa) 5000, which was discovered in July 2007 and was the largest known lunar meteorite at that time. Weighing over 25-pounds, it was a larger piece of Moon than anything in NASA has in its Apollo collections. Since its discovery, the moon rock has been sliced several times.