Artemis Project

The Artemis Project was a private venture to establish a permanent, self-supporting base on the Moon by 2002. It was named after Artemis, the goddess of the Moon and twin sister of Apollo (a reference to the Apollo project). The project's creators, The Lunar Resources Company, formed the Artemis Society as a non-profit NGO in 1994. They were not counting on mining or research activities as their initial revenue stream. Instead, they planned to cover the costs by exploiting the entertainment value in creating a lunar colony. They also believed that their costs would be a small fraction of what a government agency, such as NASA, would have spent.

The project studied other space colonization projects as well, including colonies on outer planet moons, such as Europa, thought to contain water oceans under their icy crusts.