Years ago, this conference crowd might have been called the "lunatic fringe." But they continue to take the long view about barren and forsaken celestial landscape -- and they don't have to look far to prove their point.

Decades ago, who could have thought a useless stretch of sandy real estate called Las Vegas would become a multibillion-dollar industrial base that is now the economic powerhouse for the entire state of Nevada? It was far more than a chancy roll of the dice.

LunaCorp rover preparing to enter a crater

"There is a major sea change taking place," said Rick Tumlinson, president of the Space Frontier Foundation in Los Angeles, California, a conference co-sponsor, along with the Space Studies Institute of Princeton, New Jersey.

"The year 2000 may well be looked at as the turning point at which the private sector, the people, began to take over and open the space frontier. But it has been a long, long battle," he said.

See the SpaceDev Lunar Orbiter in action.

A hundred years from now, expect to see a fully inhabited sister planet of Earth. People will be living on the moon permanently, a by-product of a multi-phase effort to create what is called the new "Planet Moon."

That's the view of David Schrunk, a former aerospace engineer and founder of the Science of Laws Institute in San Diego, California.

~

Schrunk said that a major milestone in coming years will be the manufacturing of a solar cell from lunar surface materials. "That will be as significant as fire, the computer or the steam engine," he told SPACE.com.

Plenty of energy pouring out from the sun can support lunar industrialization, Schrunk said. Large underground chambers on the moon will house people in near Eden-like ecologies, similar to those back on Earth, Schrunk said. He added that this underground engineering can be done without mussing up lunar craters on the moon's surface.

By moving Earth's industrial base to the moon, then tapping lunar resources and utilizing solar energy, as well as comets and asteroids, "we can build an entirely new planet, inhabited by us," Schrunk said.

Mark Maxwell's futuristic vision of life on the moon.

Schrunk said that a melding of commercial enterprises and governmental interests in the moon is needed. "By working together, there is a greater likelihood of success, and things can happen on a shorter time scale. That's my philosophy," he said.

 Lunar sweet spot

NASA has been quietly studying ways to couple space-agency lunar interests with commercial participation or by buying services from private firms.

"That's in our strategic plan," said Kent Joosten, chief engineer of NASA's exploration office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Joosten said that there is a special area of the moon -- the lunar south pole -- that encompasses a variety of attributes, perhaps even sun-hidden craters that brim with water ice. "You don't have to rove very far to have it all," he said.

This lunar sweet spot includes places that are in near-permanent sunlight and even areas that are in constant darkness. Also, this select lunar acreage contains tracts that always face Earth, while other locales are totally hidden from Earth's view.

There is an emerging business in doing things lunar, said conference chair Greg Bennett of the Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace.

~

"There is strong evidence that we've turned the corner," Bennett said. "People are making deals and shaking hands. We're no longer talking about what we could do, but now moving into how we could do it," he said.

Still, the biggest lunar roadblock is fighting what Bennett tags as "concept shock" -- telling taxpayers that real commercial space business does exist and that there are actual private enterprise space projects.

"We're not talking about spending or wasting taxpayer money. We are talking about commercial projects where if you don't like it, ignore it," Bennett said.

The Robotics Institute will create a machine that can operate in the frigid darkness of a shadowed crater that hasn't seen the sun in 2 billion years.

As the first president of the newly formed Moon Society, Bennett said that the spate of upcoming privately financed lunar missions opens the door for more to follow.

"Right now, there's no base of knowledge about the risks, either the business risks or the technical, political or legal risks. The first private mission becomes an important pathfinder. That opens it up, I think, for everybody," he said.