The process of establishing the world’s first operational lunar base and propellant depot business in space is underway as the Shackelton Energy Company launches its initial fund raising campaign. This comes in the footsteps of recent amazing new discoveries of huge deposits of propellant-feedstock ice on the moon by NASA and other international space programmes.
Joining forces with RocketHub, one of the largest crowd-funding platforms, SEC seeks to raise the initial seed capital necessary to complete its top level planning in order to then secure the first major round of investment capital necessary to complete preliminary designs of all system elements.
Moon Base
“Now that the business case analysis is complete, we are ready to move out with follow-on implementation steps. This is a huge programme that is very complementary to, but significantly different, to what NASA is evaluating for terrestrial-fuelled depots in space,” said Dale Tietz, SEC’s CEO.
Dale Tietz
Talking exclusively to UAS Vision, Dale Tietz, CEO said: “Humans are needed to supervise the new robots what will be required to operate in extremely harsh environments in the cold trap craters of the Moon and elsewhere, where the ice must be strip mined and processed into rocket propellants. The craters will be ultra-cold near absolute zero and totally dark, thereby presenting great opportunities for smart robots to what humans are not capable of easily. Why send a human to do a machine’s job? is our mantra.
These new unmanned robotic systems will leverage the immense amount of work currently being done around the world with unmanned systems in development for space, air, land and sea applications. The rapid advance in telecommunications and net-centric systems will also be applied maximally to the total system solution SEC is proposing to the world. We are very excited about providing in-space propellant services as quickly as possible to jumpstart the New Space economy by fueling the space frontier.”
Bill Stone
“SEC has formed its team from the best of the aerospace, mining, exploration, business and legal sectors. This is an undertaking that will challenge the best of us in the spirit of great explorers and industrialists of the past. We know what and how to do it and, crucially, have the team to do it. We will leverage the lessons learned from government-sponsored space programmes to the maximum. After a phase of robotic prospecting, our crews will establish the infrastructure in space and base camps in the lunar polar crater regions to supervise industrial machinery for mining, processing and transporting lunar products to market in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and beyond. It is essential that we seize this opportunity now to provide low cost propellants in space as a means to jumpstart the new space economy,“ said Dr. Bill Stone, SEC’s Chairman.
This space programme is set to make substantial use of new and highly sophisticated remote controlled and preprogrammed ground vehicles for prospecting and mining purposes.
Sources: Press Release; Interview