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Britain's HUMAN DNA-strewing Moon mission rakes in £200k

3 days, and Kickstarter moves lander 37% nearer takeoff

The UK-backed attempt to crowdfund a mission to the Moon has got off to a roaring start, raising over a third of its £600,000 goal in just three days.

CGI image of Lunar Mission One on the Moon

Lunar Mission One, which wants to get a new lander on the Moon in 2024 to give the space rock a deep drilling (and drop off some human hair) has managed to get nearly 2,500 people to pledge, including 11 folks who’ve forked out £5,000 or more. At the time of writing, the fund had reached a respectable £224,453.

The mission is backed by a not-for-profit trust that says with government budgets for cosmological science drastically reduced, the best way to get space exploration going is with the help of Joe Public.

The trust and its subsidiary company are planning a robotic probe that will head to the Moon in 10 years’ time to land at the lunar South Pole. Once there, the probot will drill down at least 20m (and potentially up to 100m) to get at samples that have been unaffected by cosmological radiation and meteor strikes and are billions of years old.

The spacecraft will also be assessing the area as a possible site for a permanent human base, which has been suggested before, and/or a low frequency radio telescope for observing the universe at wavelengths that aren’t possible from earth because of our pesky ionosphere.

Lunar Missions is even hopeful that there will be enough funding from Kickstarter, public and commercial backing, and the sale of digital memory boxes to have enough left over for future missions.

Those digital memory boxes are also part of the incentives for Kickstarter pledges, giving folks the opportunity to upload photos, videos and music to a sort of time capsule that Lunar Mission One will be leaving behind it in the hole it drills on the Moon.

Folks will also be able to add one physical item - a hair - so their DNA can live for aeons buried in our space-rock satellite. ®

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