If you've ever looked up at the moon and wished you could explore it, discover its vast resources and then mine those resources for profit, apparently now's your chance, but you have to act fast!

As one of only three agencies that have actually landed anything on the moon, and the only one to actually land people there, NASA has a lot of expertise in this very narrow field. However, they have no specific plans to return to the moon on their own, at least for the near future. Meanwhile, there are compa they're now looking to put that expertise to work for the private sector. The goal: to get the ball rolling on efforts to mine the moon's resources.

A program called Lunar CATALYST — Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown — is calling for applications from any private companies who'd like to enter into what they're calling a "no-funds exchanged Space Act Agreements (SAA)." Essentially, they'll provide the know-how and the launch capabilities, but the private company would actually build the robot rover(s) and flip the bill on the entire mission.

That may not sound like such a great deal, but the moon is rich in resources. The lunar crust has abundant deposits of the rare earth elements that go into a lot of our current technologies. Earth's supply of these is dwindling, making them even more rare and valuable. Another resource to be found there is Helium-3, an isotope of helium that's highly sought-after for its potential in developing fusion power. Estimates have varied for exactly how much helium-3 could be extracted from the lunar surface, but whatever they could get would be incredibly valuable.

[ More Geekquinox: Mars rover captures first image of Earth from the Red Planet ]

Now, the moon doesn't belong to NASA, of course. In fact, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty declares that all of outer space and the celestial bodies in it (including the moon) are to be explored and used for the benefit of all humanity, and no nation can lay claim to any part of it. However, noone at the time foresaw that we were going to have private companies like SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, Bigalow Aerospace, Planetary Resources and Moon Express (just to name a few) these days. Since these companies, and others like them, aren't bound by the treaty, they are free exploit off-world resources if they want ... if they can get to them. NASA simply wants to help them overcome that limitation.

The deadline for companies to submit their initial proposal is today, Monday, February 10th, at 4 p.m. EST). NASA will be reviewing them over the next three weeks, and then final proposals will be due near the end of March. As for when any missions will actually set tracks/wheels/whatever on the lunar surface, we'll just have to keep an eye on developments, but in the mean time, the Google Lunar XPrize teams are getting closer to their goal!

(Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

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