![]() The plans were kept quiet because it was felt, until 2007, that the demand side of the business was not sufficiently defined. Over the next 12 years Stone and Tietz continually refined the business calculations and expeditionary implementation plan to deliver lunar propellant and life support consumables to LEO and do so at a profit. ![]() This concept would forever change the logistics and economics game of operating beyond LEO in space, despite the fact a national decision was make to cancel Stone's futuristic Shuttle tank program and leave it to industry to work the problem. The real moneymaker was to ship raw water to LEO for processing into liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen propellants to then sell at significantly reduced prices than anything available on Earth-on demand-to all space farers. In the Clementine and Lunar Prospector data he realized––that with unlimited quantities of lunar ice in the deep, cold trap craters––the opportunity to generate large quantities of rocket propellants at Shackleton and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to refuel vehicles in cis-lunar space. His team had calculated the propellant needs for landing commercial spacecraft on the Moon. NASA and SDI scientists were ecstatic! Stone, who had developed designs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to boost expended Space Shuttle external tanks into orbit and convert them into industrial laboratories and propellant depots, saw something else in the data. Tietz, who had directed space-based portions of the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, pointed out the strong possibility that constituents of water were detected by bistatic radar returns at the South Pole of the Moon––specifically at Shackleton crater. ![]() Bill Stone reviewed the data from the Clementine satellite mission for the first time together. ![]()
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