Members of the Artemis team bet they'll have products they can sell to people who don't care much about lunar exploration. But they're hoping the real human adventure at the project's core will catch the public's imagination and send sales soaring, well, to the moon. Others are small-business owners, marketing consultants, retired military fliers, or simply space flight aficionados. They are linked by e-mail from Texas to Ohio to California to North Dakota. None has ever done anything remotely like running a billion-dollar company.
Some folks enjoy the challenge of a new video game.
And for some of us, it's a matter of finding out if we can get a few million people together and blaze a trail into the universe. Asteroid and lunar mining. Advocates tout potential profits in the tens of billions of dollars 30 or 40 years down the road. The prospect of waiting half a lifetime tends to discourage investors, most of whom want to see some return in two or three years. The sky is the limit when you talk about spaceflight.