In the 1960s, NASA had a couple of ways to get to the surface of the Moon. They came together in this famous November 1969 photo of Apollo 12 Commander Pete Conrad examining the Surveyor 3 robotic lander, with the lunar module Intrepid that brought him to the Moon parked on the horizon. Those days are long gone now, but the U.S. space agency still wants to go to the Moon-for science and for exploration experiments. The last human lunar lander project ended with the Constellation program and the Bush administration, as the Obama White House began its effort to create a private economic infrastructure in low Earth orbit. The results of that move remain to be seen, but it is probably logical that NASA's human-exploration organization is polling the private sector to see if there are any usable lunar landers on the industry's computer-aided design workstations.
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