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" It&amp;#039;s not pretty, Bill Stone&amp;#039;s dream: to die on Mars, probably alone, so his body can crumble into regolithic space dust. &amp;quot;I make it very clear in my will that I don&amp;#039;t want anyone coming for my remains,&amp;quot; Stone says. Hearing this intergalactic death talk from a middle-aged government worker in his tidy suburban  dining room is almost a joke--almost, because if anyone has shown he&amp;#039;s got the technological genius, financial ingenuity, and raw expeditionary spirit to find a way to end his life on another planet, it&amp;#039;s this lanky, sad-eyed engineer. Stone has already descended to the most remote points ever reached by humans inside the earth, to the depths of &amp;quot;inner space,&amp;quot; as he calls it--as far as six snaking miles inside the mouth of a Mexican cavern, where the blind albino scorpions scuttle. He would strap on his self-designed MK5 underwater rebreather, which can provide forty-eight hours of fresh air, pick up his self-conceived 3-D digital autonomous wall mapper, and lower his nearly fifty-year-old body down a skinny nylon rope and into flooded subterranean sinkholes. He once spent eighteen straight days underground before emerging as the flag planter on the deepest spot in the Western Hemisphere. Now Stone has plotted another caving operation, but not into the earth and not just for glory this time. He wants to mine the moon&amp;#039;s perpetually shaded craters for lunar ice, which he&amp;#039;s convinced can be converted to liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen--rocket fuel. Once he&amp;#039;s turned the moon into a giant refueling station, spacecraft will no longer have to carry huge reserve tanks for the flight home; in fact, they won&amp;#039;t even have to go home. They&amp;#039;ll be able to shuttle back and forth from the moon to an orbiting depot near the International Space Station, dropping off lunar-generated helium-3 to replace fossil fuels on earth and enough rocket fuel to propel new satellites into orbit. And with Stone&amp;#039;s estimate of ten billion tons of ice to work with, spaceships can also tank up for the push onward to Mars. If all this sounds a little kooky, especially from a guy whose day job is designing construction-site scanners at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, consider this: NASA is contemplating two key components of Stone&amp;#039;s plan. One is an &amp;quot;aerobrake,&amp;quot; which allows spacecraft to use atmospheric resistance rather than fuel-burning retro-rockets to slow down. The other is an inflatable moon habitation. &amp;quot;You need both to save onboard space for profitable cargo, not support systems,&amp;quot; says Stone, who even grinds his freeze-dried food into powder to save room on spelunking missions.  NASA is so impressed by Stone that it&amp;#039;s building his mechanical twin: DEPTHX, a fully autonomous robotic explorer that combines nearly all of his unique talents. Designed by Stone, DEPTHX is scheduled to be shot off within the decade to Europa, one of Jupiter&amp;#039;s moons, where it will plop down on the surface of a frozen ocean. DEPTHX will then melt through miles of ice, hopefully finding water and swimming off in search of microbial life-forms, all the while creating maps and beaming info back. But Stone hates being left behind. He&amp;#039;s always been an expedition leader, with an approach that harkens to Cort\u00E9s burning his ships on the shores of the New World. For his moon-colony project, which he&amp;#039;s dubbed the &amp;quot;Shackleton Crater expedition&amp;quot; and which will require him to raise $5 billion in private and public funding, Stone plans to go without any return fuel, forcing him to make his own or die trying. Same for Mars: &amp;quot;The only way to really get things happening is to send a small team up there for thirty years with no way home,&amp;quot; Stone says. &amp;quot;Give me the chance and I&amp;#039;d go tomorrow.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a2389/esq1204stone-1/>