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• Space Tourism Initiative
• SpaceFuture's Tourism page
• Space Markets: Tourism
• The Prospects for Space Tourism
• Zegrahm Space Voyages (wait until 2002)
• Artemis Project: Recreation (mostly lunar)

Way down this thread, someone commented that the Artemis Project was no closer to the moon after all these years.

What criteria would we apply to indicate that we're closer to the moon? The growth of the supporting business infrastructure? The volume of research, development, and program planning we've done? The amount of publicly posted information? The number of people participating in the Artemis Project? The number of companies involved? The increase in fidelity and detail in planning the reference mission?

All of those indicate we are much closer to the moon than we were when the Artemis Project became known publicly more than five years ago. The program continues to grow in every area, each day another step closer to the moon.

If that's still not enough, perhaps we could issue ladders to every member of Artemis Society International. We could get a heck of a volume discount. Then everyone could climb up on the ladder as the moon passes overhead and proclaim, "Hey! I'm closer to the moon!" Would that do it, or is there some other elusive criterion one might apply to being closer to the moon?

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

Way down this thread, someone commented that the Artemis Project was no closer to the moon after all these years.

What criteria would we apply to indicate that we're closer to the moon? The growth of the supporting business infrastructure? The volume of research, development, and program planning we've done? The amount of publicly posted information? The number of people participating in the Artemis Project? The number of companies involved? The increase in fidelity and detail in planning the reference mission?

All of those indicate we are much closer to the moon than we were when the Artemis Project became known publicly more than five years ago. The program continues to grow in every area, each day another step closer to the moon.

If that's still not enough, perhaps we could issue ladders to every member of Artemis Society International. We could get a heck of a volume discount. Then everyone could climb up on the ladder as the moon passes overhead and proclaim, "Hey! I'm closer to the moon!" Would that do it, or is there some other elusive criterion one might apply to being closer to the moon?

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

Way down this thread, someone commented that the Artemis Project was no closer to the moon after all these years.

What criteria would we apply to indicate that we're closer to the moon? The growth of the supporting business infrastructure? The volume of research, development, and program planning we've done? The amount of publicly posted information? The number of people participating in the Artemis Project? The number of companies involved? The increase in fidelity and detail in planning the reference mission?

All of those indicate we are much closer to the moon than we were when the Artemis Project became known publicly more than five years ago. The program continues to grow in every area, each day another step closer to the moon.

If that's still not enough, perhaps we could issue ladders to every member of Artemis Society International. We could get a heck of a volume discount. Then everyone could climb up on the ladder as the moon passes overhead and proclaim, "Hey! I'm closer to the moon!" Would that do it, or is there some other elusive criterion one might apply to being closer to the moon?

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

Way down this thread, someone commented that the Artemis Project was no closer to the moon after all these years.

What criteria would we apply to indicate that we're closer to the moon? The growth of the supporting business infrastructure? The volume of research, development, and program planning we've done? The amount of publicly posted information? The number of people participating in the Artemis Project? The number of companies involved? The increase in fidelity and detail in planning the reference mission?

All of those indicate we are much closer to the moon than we were when the Artemis Project became known publicly more than five years ago. The program continues to grow in every area, each day another step closer to the moon.

If that's still not enough, perhaps we could issue ladders to every member of Artemis Society International. We could get a heck of a volume discount. Then everyone could climb up on the ladder as the moon passes overhead and proclaim, "Hey! I'm closer to the moon!" Would that do it, or is there some other elusive criterion one might apply to being closer to the moon?

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

There's a compelling argument for preferring private funding for space development. If we do it as free enterprise, it means people are earning a living doing it. If people are earning a living from it, they will keep on doing it, forever.

This frees us from programs that start and stop due to the changing winds of politics. It frees us from waiting for the Second Coming of Apollo that will never arrive. It insulates the program from political graft. It means all the money spent on the program came from people who gladly spent their money on things they were willing to pay for.

It takes a lot longer to build a solid financial infrastructure -- we have to create a new industry. But by doing so, we create an enduring program that creates a bright future for endless generations to come.

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International
(Who is still wondering if he'll ever receive his slashdot password.)

This guy deserves a major award from the hacker community. His spirit and determination is inspiring and admirable as he 'hacks' his way to a solution to a largely self-imposed problem is DIRECTLY comparable to the spirit of the original hackers twiddling away at that train set at MIT those many years ago.

I see a lot of mean-spirited postings decrying this guy a looney, but those posters, in my view are missing the whole point. The man has a technological vision, and he's using whatever resources he can find to see it through. He has a LOT to show for his efforts, unlike a LOT of the vaporware crap that gets hailed as 'visionary' these days.
Hacking is not specific to UNIX, C and shell-scripting. It's a state of mind.

This guy's got it.

• Adventure
  To go where not so many humans has gone before.
• Profit
  look at the Artemis-Page
• Science
  a huge radio telescope on the back-side of the moon would be great. it would be shielded against all stupid earthling-radiowaves and would have no distorting atmosphere above it.

Not to confuse you with facts, but since you asked about this passage from an article I wrote for the Artemis Data Book ...

Analysis of government-sponsored space projects shows that no more than 10% of the money, usually even less, is actually spent on developing and operating the spacecraft. The rest goes to the enormous support effort and inefficient organizations necessary to answer the changing whims of the U. S. Congress, support a large institutional bureaucracy with extensive fixed assets all over the world, and to adapt to the government's management-by-meetings philosophy. While some of these extra costs can be trimmed, most of the overhead is the inevitable nature of government programs.

Actually, it's much worse.

The original analysis was done in 1994 by Marianne Dyson, who is a director of the National Space Society and a former Shuttle flight controller. Marianne catalogued the entire NASA organization and its budget from bottom to top, identifying where the money goes.

Marianne's numbers are born out to a certain degree by my personal experience. When I was Manager for EVA Assembly and Maintenance Development on the International Space Station Program at the Johnson Space Center, I ran a time log on my organization for six weeks. On the average, the engineers spent 36 hours a week attending meetings that added no value to the program, preparing for those meetings, and working action items that would not have been assigned if the meeting had not been held.

So at least during that period, 90% of the cost of employing those engineers was consumed by NASA's management-by-meetings philosophy. We can safely extrapolate that observation to all agencies of the United States federal government, or at least to those with which I am familiar. They all use the same management-by-meetings philosophy.

However, this is only what happens to the money after it gets to the contractor who is doing the real work. There's a lot more to it than this.

It does not account for the fact that more than 50% of the budget for the International Space Station program gets bled off before it ever gets to the contractor, or to the fact that just over 50% of the remaining funds go to pay the contractor's overhead. Now we're down to 25% of the funds going to development activities, and that's where my time log starts in.

Those activities include a huge percentage of the development funds being expended analyzing and complying with NASA specifications. On the surface, NASA spec isn't too bad, though rigorous, unthinking compliance with NASA spec leads to some amusing anecdotes.

One of my favorites is the air circulation fans that blow air continuously past the smoke detectors in the ISS. These are standard muffin fans, like the one that's cooling your computer right now. Simple enough, but NASA spec requires that those fans be able to operate in a vacuum. (You read it right: a fan that must be able to operate in a vacuum.) As a result of that requirement, the fans had to built and tested by hand, one at a time, at a cost to the taxpayers of $200,000 per fan.

Another personal favorite is the paper trail. Show me a piece of metal anywhere on the ISS, no matter what it does, and I can show you a paper trail that leads back to the mountain from which the original ore was mined, in which mine shaft, on what day, on which shift. I kid you not.

When I first moved to the Johnson Space Center, after 7 years in commercial airplane development, I was appalled at the time-wasting activities built into the way NASA does business. I spent 20 years at NASA trying to change these things, with some small success. The rest -- the specifications, the bureaucracy, the lack of trust in business relationships, the lack of empowerment to make decisions -- is indeed inherent to government activities. Documents decrying the incredible cost of government programs show up throughout recorded history, from JFK's consternation with the cost of the Apollo program all the way back to Hammurabi some 5000 years ago.

So we can only conclude that there's really not much we can do about the cost of doing business as government. Sorry; at least in this case, the wishful thinking is on the other side of the telescope.

Life is short. Enjoy the adventure!

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

Not to confuse you with facts, but since you asked about this passage from an article I wrote for the Artemis Data Book ...

Analysis of government-sponsored space projects shows that no more than 10% of the money, usually even less, is actually spent on developing and operating the spacecraft. The rest goes to the enormous support effort and inefficient organizations necessary to answer the changing whims of the U. S. Congress, support a large institutional bureaucracy with extensive fixed assets all over the world, and to adapt to the government's management-by-meetings philosophy. While some of these extra costs can be trimmed, most of the overhead is the inevitable nature of government programs.

Actually, it's much worse.

The original analysis was done in 1994 by Marianne Dyson, who is a director of the National Space Society and a former Shuttle flight controller. Marianne catalogued the entire NASA organization and its budget from bottom to top, identifying where the money goes.

Marianne's numbers are born out to a certain degree by my personal experience. When I was Manager for EVA Assembly and Maintenance Development on the International Space Station Program at the Johnson Space Center, I ran a time log on my organization for six weeks. On the average, the engineers spent 36 hours a week attending meetings that added no value to the program, preparing for those meetings, and working action items that would not have been assigned if the meeting had not been held.

So at least during that period, 90% of the cost of employing those engineers was consumed by NASA's management-by-meetings philosophy. We can safely extrapolate that observation to all agencies of the United States federal government, or at least to those with which I am familiar. They all use the same management-by-meetings philosophy.

However, this is only what happens to the money after it gets to the contractor who is doing the real work. There's a lot more to it than this.

It does not account for the fact that more than 50% of the budget for the International Space Station program gets bled off before it ever gets to the contractor, or to the fact that just over 50% of the remaining funds go to pay the contractor's overhead. Now we're down to 25% of the funds going to development activities, and that's where my time log starts in.

Those activities include a huge percentage of the development funds being expended analyzing and complying with NASA specifications. On the surface, NASA spec isn't too bad, though rigorous, unthinking compliance with NASA spec leads to some amusing anecdotes.

One of my favorites is the air circulation fans that blow air continuously past the smoke detectors in the ISS. These are standard muffin fans, like the one that's cooling your computer right now. Simple enough, but NASA spec requires that those fans be able to operate in a vacuum. (You read it right: a fan that must be able to operate in a vacuum.) As a result of that requirement, the fans had to built and tested by hand, one at a time, at a cost to the taxpayers of $200,000 per fan.

Another personal favorite is the paper trail. Show me a piece of metal anywhere on the ISS, no matter what it does, and I can show you a paper trail that leads back to the mountain from which the original ore was mined, in which mine shaft, on what day, on which shift. I kid you not.

When I first moved to the Johnson Space Center, after 7 years in commercial airplane development, I was appalled at the time-wasting activities built into the way NASA does business. I spent 20 years at NASA trying to change these things, with some small success. The rest -- the specifications, the bureaucracy, the lack of trust in business relationships, the lack of empowerment to make decisions -- is indeed inherent to government activities. Documents decrying the incredible cost of government programs show up throughout recorded history, from JFK's consternation with the cost of the Apollo program all the way back to Hammurabi some 5000 years ago.

So we can only conclude that there's really not much we can do about the cost of doing business as government. Sorry; at least in this case, the wishful thinking is on the other side of the telescope.

Life is short. Enjoy the adventure!

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

It would really help if you could post a URL when you're attributing things to the Artemis Project.

Either there are errors on the Artemis Project web site that we need to fix, or we see a lot of folks making up things that don't bear any semblance to the Project.

With nearly 3,000 web documents on the Artemis Project web site, errors are likely; so we really appreciate the help.

On the other hand, if you're just making it up or quoting things out of context, I'd recommend investing your energy in a more constructive pursuits. You will find that creating things is much more personally rewarding.

Thanks!

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

It would really help if you could post a URL when you're attributing things to the Artemis Project.

Either there are errors on the Artemis Project web site that we need to fix, or we see a lot of folks making up things that don't bear any semblance to the Project.

With nearly 3,000 web documents on the Artemis Project web site, errors are likely; so we really appreciate the help.

On the other hand, if you're just making it up or quoting things out of context, I'd recommend investing your energy in a more constructive pursuits. You will find that creating things is much more personally rewarding.

Thanks!

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International

In working on the website for the Artemis Society for the last year or so I dont remember seeing any schedule. Please post a URL for said schedule, I just can't seem to find it. David Wetnight

I think you mean Biosphere II. That was an scientific experiment on ecosystems, and as such was not a failure - it gave results, and the important result was that it's no way to run a moonbase.

The Lunar biological environment requires much more rigid control and totally different techniques to cope with lunar vaguarities such as the 336hr night and shortage of organic materials like dirt.

For a quick rundown on the issues, check out The Artemis Biological Recycling page or get a copy of the next Artemis Magazine.

Vik :v)

We stopped posting business models on the public web about four years ago, when the business side of the Artemis Project became a serious concern. A lot of the technical development has been moved into private forums for the same reasons.

The FAQ files about business things are currently sitting in my author stage in the WebSite Director system, waiting to be rewritten and updated. Sorry about that; there just aren't enough hours in a day and this isn't a high priority until we have something to offer. This is a very complex business venture. We're putting a lot more resources into doing it than just talking about it.

I know of one fellow who's willing to put his money where is mouth is when it comes to commercial space ventures: my boss, Robert T. Bigelow. He has set aside $500 million as seed money for the development of a business venture that leads to commercial space cruise ships that will take you on a tour around the moon. See the FAQ at the Bigelow Aerospace web site. You'll find articles about Bigelow Aerospace in the Dallas Morning News, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, several other newspapers, and all over the web.

Like Bigelow Aerospace, none of the Artemis Project program participants intends to do a public offering until there's something to offer. We're very serious about this project, so we don't want to come out with premature stock offerings or lunar real estate deals.

The best place to ask questions about the Artemis Project is the open artemis-list mailing list. See the first item on the description of mailing lists operated by Artemis Society Interntional.

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International.

We stopped posting business models on the public web about four years ago, when the business side of the Artemis Project became a serious concern. A lot of the technical development has been moved into private forums for the same reasons.

The FAQ files about business things are currently sitting in my author stage in the WebSite Director system, waiting to be rewritten and updated. Sorry about that; there just aren't enough hours in a day and this isn't a high priority until we have something to offer. This is a very complex business venture. We're putting a lot more resources into doing it than just talking about it.

I know of one fellow who's willing to put his money where is mouth is when it comes to commercial space ventures: my boss, Robert T. Bigelow. He has set aside $500 million as seed money for the development of a business venture that leads to commercial space cruise ships that will take you on a tour around the moon. See the FAQ at the Bigelow Aerospace web site. You'll find articles about Bigelow Aerospace in the Dallas Morning News, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, several other newspapers, and all over the web.

Like Bigelow Aerospace, none of the Artemis Project program participants intends to do a public offering until there's something to offer. We're very serious about this project, so we don't want to come out with premature stock offerings or lunar real estate deals.

The best place to ask questions about the Artemis Project is the open artemis-list mailing list. See the first item on the description of mailing lists operated by Artemis Society Interntional.

Greg Bennett
President, Artemis Society International.

Just curious, what have you got against the project? Those images aren't exactly the best eye-candy on the site, and they aren't even to do with the moonbase. Couldn't you find something more representative?

People interested in nice pictures should look at the decent stuff, conveniently packaged for Mac & Windows users (Unix users generally being smart enough to figure out the image conversion themselves):

http://www.asi.org/adb/06/09/0 5/image-downloads.html

There are even better images on my website. I create these images to help the engineers envisage their work; it's actually a great assistance to the design phase.

Vik :v)

Artemis estimates $1.4 billion for commercial moon trip and points out that computers make engineering much cheaper than in Apollo days.

1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.

Artemis estimates $1.4 billion for commercial moon trip and points out that computers make engineering much cheaper than in Apollo days.

1.4 billion is 15 Super Bowls. But we're restricting our view here of how much money is available for projects. Just a glance at Yahoo Business News and I see $400 million in one aircraft sale deal.

As most plans for extracting metals from the moon warm the moondust up, hydrogen is going to be a by-product of lunar industry. Oxygen is also going to be produced as a by-product in huge volumes because most of the ores are oxides - ie. loaded with oxygen. As habitats are built they will generate their own oxygen and water when their metal components are beign smelted!

But why waste it as rocket fuel? There are plenty of minerals on the moon that burn: sodium, aluminium, phosphorous and with a bit of ingenuety these can make quite rocket fuel for use under the lunar 1/6g. Aluminum-burning rockets have already been developed.

Once you're in space, electrostatic or solar thermal engines running off lunar oxygen or simple moondust will provide enough thrust for cargo transfer to and from the moon.

Have a look at Project Artemis on http://www.asi.org for details.

Vik :v) [Can't login as a non-anonymous coward for some reason - vik@asi.org]

Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter.

HOWEVER a commercial space venture that talks about making large profits probably shouldn't have a .org domain. It scares away investors. However, if I had a spare billion dollars, I know what I would buy.

Don't give up on that moonbase just yet, Hemos. Check out the info on the Artemis Project web site. They intend to establish a permanent moonbase within the next several years, and start commercial tourist flights soon thereafter. All totally private, no government involvement. Where is the money coming from? To quote their FAQ, "shameless commercialism"! They have a pretty convincing business plan, that results in ordinary slobs like me being able to take a vacation on the moon within my lifetime. They need skills of all sorts, so go see 'em.

• Map of Lunar private property.
• Map of Apollo landing sites.
• Moon Handbook, a travel guide.
• Robotic Exploration: LunaCorp, CMU Lunar Rover
• How to get there: The Artemis Project, GSC, Spacetopia
• What to do on the way there: Enjoy Low Earth Orbit
• What to do there:
  • Fun: Lunar golf and javelin throwing
  • Work: Mine oxygen

The only way to do it properly is to colonise our Moon first and use the cheaper materials from a shallower gravity well, together with orbital construction, to manufacture large craft, and hit Mars with dozens of people with thousands of tonnes of supplies to estabish a spacefareing colony there.

There is already an organisation which wishes to do this. It is called The Artemis Project and it is pretty much as close as you can get to an Open Source space effort.

Vik :v)