Dear intrepid lunar explorers: NASA politely asks that, when you travel to the moon, you refrain from messing with the American flag.
Google’s Lunar X Prize promises $20 million to whoever’s first to get a privately funded robot to the moon. But the folks at NASA don’t want any of the stuff they left up there getting messed up in the process, so they’ve offered a few handy guidelines for what to stay away from while you’re up there. (We’re looking at you, non-autonomous moon robots.)
The 93-page document, originally released in July but reasserted yesterday, reads like a user’s manual for private space shuttles, and contains a spectacular amount of both tech-talk and legalese.
But it boils down to: “Don’t land in our craters and we won’t land in yours; mostly don’t land in ours.”
via Popular Science
