IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - 4

SPECTRAL LINES
Bill Stone, an engineer and renowned
So Stone is hard at work raising
cave explorer, has been diving into
money and interest in his Shackleton
the bowels of the Earth to get ready
Crater Expedition, a complex and
to explore the furthest regions of
ambitious project to send what he
space. Stone's expeditions, covered in
calls "an industrial Lewis and Clark
National Geographic and other magamining expedition," led by himself,
zines, have taken him and his teams
to the crater by 2014. His plan calls
into some of Mexico's longest and
for the spacecraft used in this mismost dangerous underwater caves
sion to carry enough fuel for the outand tunnels, known as sumps. In 1994,
bound flight-but expedition memat the end of a harrowing and muchbers will need to make their own
documented expedition that claimed
moon-water fuel to get back, prothe life of a young diver, he and his
viding proof-of-principle of his idea.
then-girlfriend, Barbara am Ende,
And proof that it won't take a trillion
traveled more than 3.3 kilometers into
dollars and 20 years to work.
the San Agustin Sump, the deepest
Stone and other like-minded
point in Sistema Huautla in Oaxaca,
folks believe that space travel and
Mexico. To get there, they had to get
space exploration should not be the
past eight other treacherous sumps,
sole purview of government agencies
Lunar mosaic of approximately 1500 images of the south pole
of the moon, taken by the space probe Clementine.
the last one some 1500 meters underlike NASA. The U.S. space agency is
ground. Stone and am Ende found
too crippled, they say, by bureauthemselves in an enormous subterranean chamber 100 meters cracy and risk avoidance to make any significant progress in
in diameter, where they spent several days. Their footprints are manned space exploration over the coming decades. Billionaires
the only ones that have ever been left there.
like Virgin Airways' Richard Branson and Microsoft cofounder
Stone is an exceedingly rare engineer. He not only designs Paul Allen are already supporting the development of suborbital
and builds advanced technology, he uses it to explore the passenger spacecraft and are looking for other ways to break
most extreme niches of this world-and others. His latest into the space business. Stone hopes people like these will help
creation is the DEPTHX autonomous probe, whose testing is bankroll his commercial moon-mining project.
the subject of Senior Editor Jean Kumagai's story "Swimming
What does NASA think of all this? Not much. With the specto Europa" in this issue. Once again the scene of the action is ters of Apollo 13 and the Challenger disaster haunting its halls,
Mexico, where Kumagai found a considerably mellower Stone it is reluctant to even consider putting its crews at such great
than the notoriously hard-charging one of the Huautla mis- risk. But Stone is following in the "no guts, no glory" footsteps
sion 13 years ago.
of the great explorers, like Shackleton, who believed that while
But if age has mellowed Stone, it has not touched his passion careful preparation was essential to successful exploration, the
for exploration. He's not just interested in sending an unmanned danger of going where no human had ever gone before was also
probe to Jupiter's ice-bound moon Europa. He wants to go to our intrinsic to the effort.
moon-himself. According to Stone, 90 percent of the weight
At the end of the Technology Entertainment Design Conference
of present-day space vehicles, and much of the exorbitant cost talk he gave in Monterey, Calif., earlier this year, Stone showed a
of spaceflight, comes from the fuel needed to break through the slide of the ad Shackleton is said to have placed in a London newsEarth's atmospheric chains. He is convinced that if you could set paper seeking volunteers for his 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic
up a "water-mining" operation on the moon you could use the Expedition, which sought to cross the southern continent: "Men
water to make liquid oxygen rocket fuel and then port it back to Wanted: For Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, Bitter Cold, Long
a low-Earth-orbit "gas station," where new kinds of spacecraft Months of Complete Darkness, Constant Danger, Safe Return
could fuel up and take off for the stars.
Doubtful. Honour and Recognition in Case of Success."
Just how much water the moon holds is still debatable, but
Twenty-eight men signed on. If Stone has his way, we've no
Stone is one of a group of scientists and technologists who are doubt there will be men and women who will be ready to join
convinced that a vast icy lunar waterworks resides beneath the him. Is it lunacy? Of course it is. But then again, perhaps the
moon's south pole, at the Shackleton Crater, named after the Great Age of 21st Century Space Exploration is about to begin.
intrepid Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Thank heavens for lunatics like Stone.
n
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2007