Investing in the Lunar Resources Company

We have a rather lengthy list of people who have expressed an interest in investing in The Lunar Resources Company, but we have been asking everyone to wait until we have a really solid business plan and offering letter. Waiting a few months to make sure we have a program and do the job right won't cost us anything, and it will pay dividends in good management practices for decades to come.

LunaCorp is doing nicely with their marketing of CD-ROMs, but getting major investors involved directly in the space flight is more of a challenge. (Note: Mitsubishi, the company which sponsored Spacehab, recently signed with Lunacorp.) A good deal of the revenues from the lunar explorer would come from sponsors; and there's a huge amount of concept shock to be overcome when you start talking about the advertising value of having your name on a robot that goes across the moon.

Prognostication about private lunar ventures is quite premature. We all have a lot of research to do, and some education for the international business community to get used to the idea.

There's a very fundamental point about the business approach we're using in the Artemis Project: it's not a question of whether it will work, but rather how long it will take. Given enough patience, we could save up the money we need by running a lemonade stand in Alice Springs. That's one pole of the reductio ad absurdum of the approach; the other pole being some rich space activist showing up and donating $10 billion. What will really happens lies somewhere in the vast gulf between these two scenarios.