ASR's lunar sample return mission, the Lunar Retriever, will retrieve lunar rock and soil to sell both to research organizations and, through commercial channels, to the general public. ASR expects to launch Lunar Retriever by September 2000, the 30th anniversary of Luna 16, the first robotic sample return mission to soft land on the moon. "Based on the spacecraft designed for the Lunar Retriever mission, a follow-on mission to retrieve lunar soil and ice samples could be launched within six to twelve months after the initial mission at a cost well under $100 million," says Denise Norris, ASR's CEO.

When passed, the Commercial Space Act of 1997 will specifically instruct NASA to look to private companies like ASR to develop the In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) technology critical to its plans for future space exploration and colonization. And technology for using the newly-discovered lunar ice would give space exploration an immense boost. Water is critical to human life support, and can also be separated into its chemical components of hydrogen and oxygen: oxygen for breathing, and combinations of hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. But the cost of lifting the thousands of gallons of water into low Earth orbit alone, much less transporting it from there to the Moon, would be prohibitive.

The Lunar Prospector data suggests there is an immense amount of water on the Moon in the form of ice mixed in with lunar soil. But before space explorers can make use of the water, scientists and engineers will have to figure out how best to extract it from the lunar soil, in which it is sparsely scattered. The Lunar Prospector's investigators, Dr. Alan Binder of the Lunar Research Institute in Gilroy, California and Dr. William Feldman of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, say the data suggests that water ice is confined to the polar regions and exists at only a 0.3 percent to 1 percent mixing ratio in combination with the rocky lunar soil.

Jay Manifold, ASR's Vice President of Research and Development, says, "The key to ISRU development, including research on how to extract and use lunar ice, is putting samples of lunar resources in the hands of scientists on Earth. ASR's goal is to use existing technologies to deliver spacecraft to any destination with precision, and return resources and information with equal precision, for a profit. Our Lunar Retriever, for example, will use the same Lockheed-Martin Athena 2 rocket as the Lunar Prospector. A mission to collect samples of lunar polar ice, and return them in cryogenic storage, would be a logical next step for us."

ASR's principals stress the importance of entrepreneurs to opening near-Earth space to the resource development that will make possible fulfilling NASA's exploration goals. ASR will make its services available to private and public concerns alike, but will take no subsidies. "Humankind will only benefit from the resources of space when they are developed by private enterprises such as ours," says Denise Norris. "We intend to use our knowledge, creativity, hard work and business vision to demonstrate the viability of market-driven space missions. We will not go to the public asking them to send us into space. We will go into space first, then come to the public with something to offer: the productive utilization of the vast resources of near-Earth space."