Is there a business case that would support a private, unmanned mission to the moon? The people at Lunar Mission One certainly think so. If they're right, an unmanned lander will touch down on a crater rim near the Moon's south pole in 2024. Part of the lander will be devoted to scientific exploration, drilling through the regolith into the underlying rock and then analyzing the cores.

Once the borehole is drilled, the lander will fill it with what Lunar Mission One calls "the ultimate time capsule." This will actually be a pair of archives—one public, containing a digital record of life on Earth, and a second private archive. The latter, with up to 10 million individual "digital memory boxes," is what's going to pay for the mission. We recently spoke with David Iron, the founder of Lunar Mission One, to find out a bit more.

Iron has a lengthy background in the space industry, and he came up with the idea of crowdfunding a moon landing after the UK government asked him to put together the case for funding space exploration. Iron said he was thinking about how to persuade people to pay to put their stuff on the moon. "Information is OK, but you'll only get a few tens of dollars from each person, which isn't enough," he told Ars. "It wasn't until I realized that we can also store hair, because it's incredibly small and light, that people would pay hundreds of dollars for that, and I realized we had a business case."

The digital memory boxes will also be able to hold a strand of hair each, so for $300 you can send not just a digital record of your life on earth (or whatever else you want to use those bytes for) but also a copy of your genome. Lunar Mission One's market research suggests that, globally, there should be sufficient interest in the idea that it will appeal beyond just space enthusiasts. "People have tried to crowdfund space projects before; you can only raise tiny amounts. You will not get the space community and space enthusiasts [alone] to fund something like us," Iron said.

Indeed, previous attempts to crowdfund a space launch didn't go well for the Moonspike project.

Lunar Mission One

Lunar Mission One

Lunar Mission One

"The idea of a private archive—your story, your DNA—it's not everyone's cup of tea, but it takes us well beyond the space community. We need to prove it properly with sales, which we'll do step by step," Iron said.

First was a Kickstarter campaign in 2014, which raised just over $1 million. Next up is a joint mission with Astrobotic, one of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competitors. Astrobotic plans to land on the moon in 2017; along for the ride will be a digital archive from Lunar Mission One.

The project, called Footsteps on the Moon, is part of the outreach strategy. Lunar Mission One is trying to democratize access to our closest neighbor in space. "The concept is that the moon is for everybody, and you can stand on the moon in a virtual way by sending a photograph of your foot to the moon," Iron said.

Some people will be inspired to do more, spending $25 or so on a private data allocation. In turn, that exposes them to more information about the project. "What they do is then learn about the 2024 mission, the billion-year archive, step by step, which allows us to test the market every year of this eight- to ten-year program," he said.

Of course, there's more to Lunar Mission One than just drilling a hole and filling it with digital life stories and some hair samples. There are actually two separate projects of equivalent size and cost. The first is meant to help develop science and technology for space exploration; the second is a crowdsourced snapshot of life on Earth that should outlast everything until the Sun's gradual decline into old age swells it up into a red giant that eats the moon, the archive, and everything else this side of Mars.