If you want to get to the moon, you need to spend an enormous amount of resources developing, creating, testing, and deploying a variety of spacecraft and technologies. All you need is money. Lots of money. For decades the only entities with enough green in checking accounts were large governments or multi-national consortia. But nowadays we have some absurdly wealthy, and absurdly motivated, individuals who have stars in their eyes and designs on space missions of their own.

Take for example Jared Isaacman, who otherwise would’ve been just another random billionaire except for the fact that he has privately financed out of his own fortune the Polaris program, which included the recent successful first ever spacewalk by a private astronaut. And it wasn’t just any spacewalk, it was the highest altitude orbital flight since the Gemini program! The mission launched on September 10, 2024, and it wasn’t through NASA or JAXA or Roscosmos. It was with SpaceX, aboard one of that company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launched with a Falcon 9 rocket. Isaacman, along with his crew of three others, underwent extensive training and preparation for the mission, not much different than the rigorous program that NASA puts its astronauts through.

The mission was huge success, setting a new record for the number of people simultaneously exposed to vacuum – the primary reason for that being the Dragon capsule doesn’t have a proper airlock, so to perform the spacewalk the entire capsule has to be opened up to space. So it’s not like the record was set on purpose, it was a limitations of the design of the spacecraft, but hey a record is a record.

And since there are no laws in space, just a loose set of international agreements that governments kind of sort of follow, at least for now as long as it doesn’t get in the way of future plans, if you want to follow in Jared’s footsteps, and you’ve got enough money to finance your dreams, you can do it too.

So perhaps the first person to return to the Moon since the Apollo era will be…some random rich person who just figured out how to it themselves.

Think I’m crazy? Think again.

We’ve already sent a privately-developed lander to the Moon, Intuitive Machine’s Odysseus lander, which while it tipped over sideways as it landed it still survived and sent data back. Firefly Aerospace hopes to send the Blue Ghost lander this November launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9, followed in December by the iSpace – a Japanese company – rover mission. Intuitive Machines isn’t done yet, and they hope to try again early next year, this time hopefully with a lander that sticks the landing. Then there’s Astrobotic, Blue Canyon Technologies, Draper, Astrolab, and more.

While any one single company may not be able to compete with the resources of an entire nation, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a consortium or partnership could do the trick. Just look at the Polaris mission for example: Isaacman didn’t build the rocket or spacecraft himself, but he did finance the development of just about everything else, including the extravehicular activity suits, laser communication systems, and more.

Heck, since the current Artemis program calls for a private company to develop the human landing system to get people onto the lunar surface, technically if that program succeeds it will be SpaceX or Blue Origins, not a NASA-built craft, that will be the first to deliver astronauts to the Moon since Apollo.

And it makes one think: what if we just skipped the whole SLS part of Artemis? Both SpaceX and Blue Origins are developing heavy- and superheavy-lift vehicles.

Both of them are developing human landing systems for getting on and off the moon. All of these endeavors are funded in large part by NASA anyway. Does NASA really need its own rocket anymore? Of course, that might be NASA’s backup plan: even if the SLS program fails, and the Artemis project never delivers an astronaut to the moon, we’ll still have the capability to do it anyway, and it just might be a private individual, a civilian, who puts the right money together to make it happen.