Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that's not enough, he's also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.

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Engineer and daredevil explorer Bill Stone is obsessed with discovery. After years of crawling through the deepest unexploredcaveson the planet,he’s building robots to go where he can’t. His companyStone Aerospacebuilt DepthX, an autonomous robot, which descended 1,099 feet down Mexico’s deepest watery sinkhole. By 2008 he’ll send an enhanced machine through the ice of Lake Bonney in the Antarctic. But that’s just a test for the real mission,building a probe with Nasa to bore through miles of ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa, then swim through the buried Europan sea in search of alien life.

He’s also hoping tosinglehandedly jump-start commercial human space explorationby offering spacefarers affordable fuels and consumables extracted from the moon. His newShackleton Energy Company, or SEC, intends to raise $15 billion (as he points out, this is about the cost of a North Sea oil production platform complex) to mine ice thought to be trapped on the moon's southern pole at  Shackleton Crater, and to sell derived products (including propellants and other consumables) on the moon and in low earth orbit (LEO) to international consumers. If all goes well, SEC will be open for business as early as 2015 as an international energy company.

"With a doctorate in structural engineering and 11 patents to his credit, Stone is the archetypal modern-day explorer, a multidisciplinary maverick constantly inventing tools in the name of discovery lust"

                                                                                                                              Wired

source:www.ted.com