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Golden Spike announce Phase A for commercial lunar landing missions
From
NASASpaceflight.com – Golden Spike formed in 2010, has an impressive board of directors, led by Board Chair Gerry Griffin – a former Director of Johnson Space Center and Apollo Flight Director – and President/CEO Alan Stern, the well-known Planetary scientist, and former head of all NASA science missions.
The board includes former NASA engineers, astronauts and managers – including the highly respected former Space Shuttle Program (SSP) manager Wayne Hale, along with commercial space notables, such as former SpaceX program manager for the Dragon spacecraft, Max Vozoff.
For the last two years, the company has been building a business model and conducting technical studies into the lunar architecture they are currently pursuing.
Realizing their goal – to the point they successfully carry out their first crewed lunar surface mission – will cost between $7 and $8 billion. While no specific details into current funding are likely to be revealed during this initial period, the company has said it will be mainly relying on funding via sales revenue, generated via contracts they expect to be signed by customers for actual lunar flights.
Funding levels and speculations on sources
Although the cost to get a crewed lunar surface mission is $7-8 billion. They are not developing the launch vehicles. Lunar lander technology has been developed by Armadillo Aerospace. The actual level of funding might be kept below $500 million. They would need to have the government customers (NASA, US military, India, Brazil, China, Canada etc… ) If they have the connections and are able to get some customers with some early unmanned missions, then they could bootstrap to the crewed landings.
There are several billionaires who have been willing to spend money on space ventures. Google’s CEO Larry Page and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, former Microsoft chief architect Charles Simonyi, K. Ram Shriram, and Ross Perot Jr.
Newt Gingrich is also friends with Sheldon Aldelson (billionaire owner of Las Vegas Sands – which owns the Venetion hotels, net worth about $21 billion).
Space Agency Budgets
Civiliaan Space agency budgets at wikipedia.
Country Agency Budget (USD) USA NASA $17,700 million Europe ESA $5,430 million (2011) Russia ROSCOSMOS $3,800 million (2011) France CNES $2,822 million (2010) Japan JAXA $2,460 million Germany DLR $2,000 million India ISRO $1,320 million China CNSA $1,300 million Italy ASI $1,000 million Iran ISA $500 million United Kingdom UKSA $414 million Brazil AEB $343 million Canada CSA $300 million South Korea KARI $300 million Ukraine NSAU $250 million Belgium BELSPO $170 million Argentina CONAE $148 million Spain INTA $135 million Sweden SNSB $100 million
The US also has a spy agency space budgets.
See more and subscribe to NextBigFuture at 2012-12-07 16:22:28 Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/12/golden-spike-announce-phase-for.html
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