Silicon Valley Heavyweights Fire Up Plan For an Open Lunar Settlement

pacopico writes: Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it’s possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They’ve formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the lunar surface and then to start work on a habitat. The idea is to build a settlement in the spirit of open-source technology where data and hardware designs can be shared and where policies around the settlement are shaped by people all over the world rather than a particular nation state or billionaire. So far the team is small and working off a few million dollars, but there’s an all-star cast of advisors, including former astronauts, NASA heads and aerospace execs.