LunaCorp was a company headed by David Gump, and established in 1989 and based in

Arlington, Virginia Arlington County, or simply Arlington, is a County (United States), county in the U.S. state of Virginia. The county is located in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from Washington, D.C., the nati ...

. It was designed around a privately funded mission, using Russian technology, to put a rover on the

Moon The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It Orbit of the Moon, orbits around Earth at Lunar distance, an average distance of (; about 30 times Earth diameter, Earth's diameter). The Moon rotation, rotates, with a rotation period (lunar ...

. The goal of the company was to fund the mission by the entertainment value of having customers drive the rover. The program's advisor was Dr.

Buzz Aldrin Buzz Aldrin ( ; born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.; January 20, 1930) is an American former astronaut, engineer and fighter pilot. He made three extravehicular activity, spacewalks as pilot of the 1966 Gemini 12 mission, and was the Lunar Module Eag ...

. In 1995, the company intended to have two rovers on the moon by 1998. The rovers were never launched. It was expected that the commercial lunar rover would bring in revenue by selling science data and entertainment. He hoped to recoup one-third of the rovers' cost by selling the ability to control its rovers to theme parks and science museums. After producing no tangible results the company was dissolved in 2003. The details of the mission evolved with time. Because the Moon is hotter than

boiling Boiling or ebullition is the rapid phase transition from liquid to gas or vapor, vapour; the reverse of boiling is condensation. Boiling occurs when a liquid is heated to its boiling point, so that the vapour pressure of the liquid is equal to ...

water at noon and colder than

liquid nitrogen Liquid nitrogen (LN2) is nitrogen in a liquid state at cryogenics, low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about . It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, mobile liquid whose vis ...

at night, in the final version of the design the

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

would avoid those extremes by circumnavigating the Moon every 29.5 days (the length of a lunar day) to stay in sunlight, a strategy originally proposed by

Geoffrey Landis Geoffrey Alan Landis (; born May 28, 1955) is an American aerospace engineer and author, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on planetary exploration, interstellar propulsion, solar power and photovoltaics. He h ...

. "Our robot, by driving completely around the Moon at a high

latitude In geography, latitude is a geographic coordinate system, geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from −90° at t ...

at only a few kilometers per hour, will enjoy lunar morning temperatures all the time by staying in sync with the

sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

", said the mission's controller.

References

External links

LunaCorp press release (2000) from Space Frontiers.org

2007.
Interview: LunaCorp and Orbital Outfitters
, Daily Spaceflight News, 15 December 2010. Private spaceflight companies Companies disestablished in 2003 Defunct spaceflight companies {{space-stub