Anticipations of a Secret Private Manned Moon Launch

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die _Tom Delaney, Blues and Jazz Composer.

Internet rumors have been swirling for several weeks of a secret venture backed by private entrepreneurs that would return people to the moon’s surface. It seems that the veil will finally be lifted this week, during a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 6.

“The Golden Spike Company invites you to attend a game-changing announcement about the future of commercial human space travel to the Moon,” reads the announcement for the media briefing. ”Executives from the company will describe the team, the mission architecture, and the business model.”

...The Golden Spike Company is registered in Colorado to planetary scientist and aerospace engineer Alan Stern, who ran NASA’s science directorate from 2007 to 2008. Stern also worked in the private spaceflight sector that year, as an independent research representative for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. In a 2011 interview he said, “I hope that in 10 to 20 years’ time, we are on the hills of human return to the moon, so that we could then go on with humans to explore the solar system. I think this is our destiny.”

Golden Spike is a reference to the ceremonial spike driven into the rails connecting the U.S. transcontinental railroad in 1869, which helped open up the American West. _Wired

Going to space is expensive, risky, and politically / legally fraught with peril. But if the great private space rush is to ever take place in search of outer space wealth and resources, someone has to go first.

Meanwhile, SpaceX' Elon Musk has dreams of interstellar flight

Curiosity Rover finds methane and more on Mars

The engines of the Skylon spaceplane pass a test, which brings hypersonic flight closer to reality.

In addition, it looks as if a large amount of water ice may have been located on the dark side of Mercury.

Space is the mother lode of riches, in terms of precious metals, base metals, and the important volatiles that will keep people alive in the alien environment of space. Space also represents the "high ground," which gives a military advantage to the nation that first establishes a strong permanent presence outside Earth's gravity well.

Private individuals and groups have essentially no standing before the international legal organisations that determine space law. It will be interesting to see how well the ambitions of Earth's new mega-billionaires -- and would-be trillionaires -- can be constrained by thuggish and corrupt organisations such as the UN and the like.