Following up on the previous item about William Stone's proposal for a privately financed lunar mining project, a reader pointed to some additional resources on a web page at Stone Aerospace: News: Stone Aerospace Advocates Commercial Mining of the Moon - Stone Aerospace - Jan.15.07.

This includes a general article in PopSci: Robot Subs in Space - Popular Science - Feb.07 issue.

There is also this 62 page writeup from 2003 in which Dr. Stone laid out the basics for using lunar resources to obtain rocket propellants: The Shackleton Crater Expedition: A Lunar Commerce Mission in the Spirit of Lewis and Clark by William C. Stone- November 17, 2003 (pdf). This was a proposal for a government funded project while now he is trying to raise interest in doing it with private funding.

Unless he has Paul Allen and/or several other hyper-rich moguls backing him, I think there is near-zero chance of him obtaining multi-billion dollar funding up front from private investors for such a scheme. Perhaps if there is a lower initial cost, incremental way to carry it out, he could get the project going and accelerate it later if a future NASA administrator decided to drop the current lunar exploration plan in favor of a lunar COTS approach involving a governmental/commercial partnership.

Regardless, I think it is interesting that the meme of private manned lunar projects is gradually growing in familiarity and the giggle factor is slowly fading. In 2004 the Constellation Services proposal of a Soyuz lunar fly-by flight for private passengers took even many aerospace people by surprise both by its audacity and by the fact that it was actually technically feasible with current technology. Space Adventures later began offering a very similar lunar mission to anyone willing to put down $100M for a seat. Though that is a mind-boggling amount of money to most people, I think if there was reasonable assurance that the safety of such a mission was similar to that of a flight to the ISS, there would be some takers. (Richard Branson, for example, is worth several billion dollars and is known for his willingness to take on daredevil feats.)

Robert Bigelow recently described a plan for using his inflatable habitats for a lunar base. Presumably he is thinking about this in terms of a NASA funded project but I'm sure he has also considered the possibility of private lunar facilities on the long term.

I remember an interview with former astronaut Alan Bean awhile back in which he stated flatly that private individuals would not travel to the Moon until a couple of centuries from now. I think that probably remains the opinion of most people but, as happened with space tourism, we could see a change of view over the next few years.