Space

Shackleton Energy Company Propellant Depots

• Jaw-Dropping
• Inspirational
• Courageous

By 2020, Shackleton Energy Company (SEC) intends to become the world’s foremost space-based energy company providing rocket propellants, life support, consumables, and services in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and on the Moon to all spacefarers. The company will use a mix of industrial astronauts and advanced robotic systems to provide a strategically-assured, continuous supply of propellants to already-defined customers in space. Critical to the success of this operation is the prospecting for and mining of ice located within deep, inhospitable, ultra-cold craters at the polar regions of the Moon.  NASA estimates the deposits contain billion of tons of ice free for mining under the Outer Space Treaty. Ice will be transformed into a variety of products the most lucrative and useful being liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants.  Using this enormous supply, we will be able to realistically meet the propellant demand required by an expanding space economy in perpetuity. Hear more about the project (http://www.youtube.com/v/ccrN-tW1YSY) taken from our full TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html).

The reason that we are doing it is that international government-sponsored space programs do not have the funds, the mandate for commercialization or the risk models to affordably conduct the mission.  It is now totally appropriate for industry (SEC) to step in to complete the final steps to success and to service these nations and others as customers of SEC products in space. Funding for our program will not come from governments or traditional investment, but a combination of private, mining and energy derived sources.

Our goal is to enable major new science, security and commercial (including tourism) applications to flourish in space by opening service stations and business centers on the yet to be developed highways of the Earth-Moon economy––thereby becoming a major factor in opening the space frontier.  It is crucial to understand that a 2-pronged private enterprise effort is required to open and fuel the space frontier in our lifetime.  First, entrepreneurial launch companies are working hard to reduce launch costs for business-class payloads to LEO.  We will rely extensively on lower cost launch vehicles to reduce our overall development and operating costs. Secondly, and most importantly, SEC will provide the commercial infrastructure backbone with its propellant depots that will enable a massive reduction in the cost of launching anything into space.  This enormous cost reduction is due to exploiting the much lower gravity gradient well (1/6^th g) that exists on the Moon, using clever aerobraking maneuvers from the Moon to LEO that does not rely on expensive fuel consumption and a mission concept that we have developed that relies on a modular, flexible, reuseable system transportation architecture. 

To make this business a reality, SEC has assembled an international team of highly capable explorers; space engineers; robotic mining experts, proven aerospace managers; economists, and space policy/legal experts. SEC team members have deeply embedded relationships at many levels within the international space community, industry, academia and NASA. We are ready to launch this space program and will use the proceeds of this offering to jumpstart the huge engineering and organizational effort necessary to have our industrial astronauts on the Moon by 2020 and be open for business.  For those that want more detail, you can learn more about our program from these articles:

www.space.com/10619-mining-moon-water-bill-stone-110114.html
www.space.com/10634-moon-base-lunar-outpost-technology.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mining-the-moon
www.stoneaerospace.com/news-/news-mining-moon.php
www.stoneaerospace.com/news-/news-press-release-1.php

In the spirit of bold historic expeditions led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Lewis & Clark, and other acclaimed explorers, we are seeking your help with catalytic funds. This will finalize our integrated space system technical models and create working simulations of the entire space program in order to establish the investment framework necessary to begin the full program before the end of 2012. (All rewards above $5,000 are subject to SEC succesfully raising full program investment)

Come join us in the adventure and know that your contribution helped build the platform of human expansion into space!  Every bit counts.

FLASH NEWS

SEC issues Press Release 11 Nov 2011 @ www.shackletonenergy.com

NASA Sagan Inspirational Video

www.youtube.com/v/oY59wZdCDo0

NASA Confirm Huge Amounts of Water on the Moon

www.youtube.com/v/cHN_ZfqA6JY&feature=related

NASA Mars Science Lab Launch (11/26/2011)--Almost Identical Configuration to SEC Lunar Prospector Missions

www.youtube.com/v/1QCNsKricls

New Shackleton Crater Image (High Resolution)

http://web.mit.edu/mazarico/Public/UMSF/shackleton_25m_jpg.jpg