LunaCorp, was a small but ambitious private company headed by its former president David Gump, established in 1989. It was designed around a privately funded mission, using Russian technology, to put a rover on the Moon. The aim for 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, who, together with Neil Armstrong, walked on the surface of the Moon in 1969 during the first manned lunar mission. After producing no tangible results the company was dissolved in 2003.http://www.lunacorp.com/lunacorp.html The details of the mission evolved with time. Because the Moon is hotter than

boiling Boiling is the rapid vaporization of a liquid, which occurs when a liquid is heated to its boiling point, the temperature at which the vapour pressure of the liquid is equal to the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding atmosphere. Th ...

water at noon and colder than

liquid nitrogen Liquid nitrogen—LN2—is nitrogen in a liquid state at low temperature. Liquid nitrogen has a boiling point of about . It is produced industrially by fractional distillation of liquid air. It is a colorless, low viscosity liquid that is wide ...

at night, in the final version of the design the robot would avoid those extremes by circumnavigating the Moon every 29.5 days (the length of a lunar day) to stay in sunlight, a strateg
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 ...

. "Our robot, by driving completely around the Moon at a high latitude at only a few kilometers per hour, will enjoy lunar morning temperatures all the time by staying in sync with the sun", 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