StartupRealities

StartupRealities No 160 MoonlightHarvester is a renewable energy company that generates (expensive) electricity from moonlight and utilises it for special occasions, for example to provide moonlight-powered illumination at wedding ceremonies. Generating electricity from moonlight is not commercially viable unless the power is used for symbolic purposes for which customers are willing to pay an enormous premium. Even at full moon, the moon is 100,000 times less luminous than the sun at noon. The company takes great care to store separately in special batteries the power generated at night from moonlight so that it is never mixed with cheap solar energy. MoonlightHarvester is working on developing future technology that may be able to capture starlight in addition to moonlight. This will allow the company to launch a franchise operation called StarlightHarvester. Starlight is much dimmer even than moonlight so harvesting it in any material way with existing solar panels is currently ...

StartupRealities No 83 MoonDust is a space technology and memorabilia company which plans to launch a single uncrewed mission to the surface of the Moon to bring moon dust back to Earth in 2023. The company is taking pre-orders in a crowdfunding campaign and plans to retrieve one tonne of moon material with a retail price of USD 10 billion. STATISTICS Limited amounts of lunar samples (moon soil / moon rock) have ever been brought back to Earth. NASA has 382 kg of moon material brought back in the Apollo 11 to Apollo 17 missions (1969-1972) but none of this is for sale. The former Soviet Union has less than a kilogram, collected with robotic probes in missions in 1970-1976. PRICE NASA estimated in 2003 that its cost of retrieval of the lunar samples was USD 50,800 per gram (in 1973 dollars), which would equal USD 308,000 per gram in 2020 dollars. According to a 2018  article in The Washington Post, 0.2 grams of Soviet lunar soil were sold at auction in 1993 at a price of US...