Want to take your business elsewhere?
How about the moon?
A company that aims to launch the first commercial mission to the moon next year is auctioning off the opportunity for movers and shakers everywhere to tuck a business card aboard the spacecraft.
TransOrbital Inc. hopes its TrailBlazer spacecraft will become the first for-profit probe to enter lunar orbit soon after a launch ambitiously slated for July 2001.
To defray the $15 million mission’s cost, the company is selling space on advertising-emblazoned balloons to be released by the spacecraft, as well as a pricey chance to stow aboard the probe everything from old love letters to rings to business cards.
The spacecraft will spend approximately three months orbiting the moon and then impact it, scattering its profit-making cargo.
"Some people are real hotshot salesman, perhaps it will be a boost to be able to say, ‘I’m such a salesman my card’s on the moon,’" said Gregory Nemitz, TransOrbital’s vice president. "That’s something NASA would never offer."
"It's taking potshots at the moon. Are we declaring open season on the moon? It strikes me that there would be some real ethical and ecological principles, it's sort of 'Destroy the lunar landscape.'"
Business cards cost a flat $2,500 each to send; other objects are that much a gram. The objects would add required mass to the spacecraft otherwise occupied by inert ballast.
To test the market’s interest in the unique service, however, TransOrbital plans to auction off on various Internet sites as many as 10 spots for business cards.
The first, posted on www.ebay.com, began May 15 and ends May 25. As of late Monday, the auction had attracted a lone, $500 bidder.
"I think that person is definitely getting a bargain," Nemitz said. The bidder did not respond to an email from SPACE.com seeking comment.
TransOrbital has also contracted with a Texas company to carried vials of cremated human remains to the moon, replicating in a commercial way the feat pulled off by NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission.
That spacecraft purposefully impacted the moon at 3,800 mph (6,080 kilometers per hour) on July 31, 1999, scattering in the process a tiny portion of the remains of renowned planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker.
That tribute earned NASA a sharp rebuke from the Navajo Nation, which holds the moon to be sacred.
Don DeVicenzi, chief of the space science division of NASA’s Ames Research Center, said the TransOrbital proposal raises all kinds of concerns.
"It’s taking potshots at the moon. Are we declaring open season on the moon?" DeVicenzi said. "It strikes me that there would be some real ethical and ecological principles, it’s sort of ‘Destroy the lunar landscape.’"
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