Commercial Ventures Enhance Race to Return to the Moon. "The Moon is ripe for commercial development," says Dennis Laurie, CEO of TransOrbital, Inc (www.transorbital.net). The Company's lunar TrailBlazer mission has just become the first privately funded lunar venture to win licensing approval from the government. TransOrbital plans to launch a lunar orbiter to the Moon within 9 to 12 months to capture images of Earthrise as well as create a detailed map of the lunar surface. The company hopes to develop communication and navigation systems for Moon exploration and tourism. "The cost of (Moon travel) will be coming down and opportunities going up," says Laurie. Other companies intent on lunar missions include LunaCorp (www.lunacorp.com), which wants to place a live video satellite into lunar orbit and a rover on the surface to search for polar ice, and Applied Space Resources (www.applied-space.com), which wants to conduct a sample return mission. There have been a few suggestions from NASA insiders that new NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory is showing more interest in the Moon than has been exhibited by NASA management in a long time. Announcements by India, China, Europe, Japan and Russia of plans for lunar missions may be causing the U.S. to rekindle its interest in the Moon so as not to be the only major space-faring country without a lunar program. While lack of interest may be a cause for the dearth of official lunar programs, lack of funding remains the biggest stumbling block to private ventures. TransOrbital and LunaCorp intend to use advertising, education and entertainment opportunities to fund their missions. A successful strategy may include combining talents of big and small companies such as SpaceDev (www.spacedev.com) and Boeing (www.boeing.com) with the resources of government agencies. Whether it is a government program, a commercial venture, or some combination of the two, "The Moon is going to get some due, no matter what," says Wendell Mendell of NASA's Office for Human Exploration at JSC.

The Moon: Keystone to Understanding Planetary Geological Processes. Data from previous exploration of the Moon has provided deep insight into geology, geochemistry, mineralogy, petrology, chronology, geophysics and internal structure, notes James W. Head, III of Brown University in his paper for "The Moon Beyond 2002" workshop (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/moon2002/pdf/3073.pdf) to be held 12-14 Sep in Taos NM. In order to maximize the usefulness of the Moon as a keystone to understanding planetary geological processes and history, three major steps are required: 1) Compilation of the existing information and data sets into a readily available and easily understood synthesis; 2) Identification of existing gaps in our knowledge about the Moon; 3) Acquisition of data that will address these questions and filling existing gaps in our knowledge. The upcoming missions by ESA and Japan, Head believes, will provide important additional insight into comparative planetological problems such as deconvolution of the complex record of early lunar crustal formation and evolution, relation of geological processes to the thermal evolution of the Moon and one-plate planets, establishment of a key planetary perspective on the first half of Solar System history and extrapolation of these results to the nature and evolution of terrestrial planetary bodies including the Earth.