Several proposals for financing the first flight with a lottery have come up. There are a couple of people working on this concept. So far nobody has put together a complete business plan for a world-wide lottery, so we haven't made any progress in that arena. I like the idea of making the lottery tickets look nifty enough that the ticket itself would be a nice souvenir. (The illustration at the left doesn't quite do it.)

One word of caution if you want to do the research to figure out all the legalities of running a lottery: A seat on the first manned Artemis Project to the moon is priced at US$1,000,000,000, cash up front; and the price goes up as we get closer to flight. Seats on later flights should be considerably less expensive.

I haven't been working this one myself because I don't know anything at all about lotteries; I've never even bought a lottery ticket.

The drawback to using a lottery to finance the first flight is that it wouldn't establish a supporting economic infrastructure. On the other hand, the assets in place after the first flight might be enough to assure continued development, so if someone can put together a full business plan on this, we can probably find a way to make it work.