SPACE: ‘PROMISE’ me the moon? NASA wants to send spare nuclear-powered Mars rover to the lunar surface.

Isaacman also announced the potential repurposing of an engineering development model built to mirror the agency’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars. “There is another,” Isaacman said, quoting Yoda’s line from “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”

That test rover is called PROMISE, short for “Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration” (though it was formerly known as Optimism). PROMISE was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where it has been used as a test platform for fixes or commands that engineers want to try on the ground before permanently sending them to Perseverance and Curiosity. Now, NASA wants to send PROMISE on a mission of its own.

Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity — both of which remain active on Mars — without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it.

“We’ve had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we’ve got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in,” he said. “So the question was posed: ‘What if we send it to the moon?'”

Beats the hell out of staying in California.