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Plan for Privately-Funded Moon Base

Posted by Roblimo on from the man-who-sold-the-moon dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Check out The Artemis Project. A project to have a self-supporting moon base and commercial flights within a decade. According to the FAQ, the project will be paid for by 'shameless commercialism'." The project's leaders say their approach is nothing like D. D. Harriman's, but more along the lines of P.T. Barnum.

1 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. lofty goals by SEAL · · Score: 5

    I read through many of the questions in their FAQ, which immediately threw more questions into my mind. The people involved in this project seem to have a good level of knowledge with regards to space travel and the physics behind it. This is good, of course, since I'd certainly want qualified people if I was going to take this sort of vacation.

    But where is the business model? I saw estimates for the feasibility study, project design, and testing. A couple year span is given for each. Where are they getting these numbers? Since they estimate the project to run over a billion dollars, where do they plan to get the capital?

    And who's going to risk providing venture capital without a solid plan? They say that they plan to make an immediate profit through the entertainment angle. Well that's fine and dandy, but there is no mention of the overhead associated with doing this. This isn't like a standard vacation. You need lawyers to deal with possible accidents. Special security people would need to protect the enclosed environment from some nutcase going postal.

    In short, private enterprise has pros and cons. They avoid the overhead of a government project. However, the people they will be transporting do not have the same level of expertise, trustworthiness, and professionalism as traditional astronauts. This adds to the expense.

    Don't get me wrong - I think it would be a beautiful thing if we each had the opportunity to experience space travel. But these guys have their heads in the clouds, and really need to formulate a solid business model before they have any hope of getting off the ground (sorry that was kinda bad ;))

    Best regards,
    SEAL