An effort to crowdfund a moon rocket has until Sunday to raise most of the $1 million its founders say they need to kick the project off. The Moonspike initiative seeks to build a 22-ton, liquid-fueled rocket to launch a small spacecraft to the moon’s surface. As of Friday afternoon, the group had raised about $116,000.

The venture’s co-founders are Kristian von Bengtson, who made his name as the lead spacecraft designer and flight director for Copenhagen Suborbitals, and entrepreneur Chris Larmour.

Copenhagen Suborbitals was an amateur, part-time venture to launch rockets to about 100km, so von Bengtson said he was attracted to Moonspike because it is a full-time initiative.

“One of the things I really love about Moonspike is that it is the same adventure but we take it further,” he told Ars. “It’s not a project we work on in the evening and weekends.”

The co-founders plan to build the rocket themselves. After spending nine months on a feasibility study, they calculated that to put 1 cubic gram on the moon would require a 150kg spacecraft, and to get that spacecraft to the moon would require a 22-ton, three-stage launch vehicle.

Moonspike plans to use funds raised during the Kickstarter campaign as seed funding for an effort they estimated to cost in the tens of millions of dollars. They have not selected a launch date, but it would not be before the 2020s. It's not clear whether Moonspike will continue if the crowdfunding campaign fails.

Space projects that have sought to raise public money through crowdfunding have had mixed success. The asteroid mining company Planetary Resources had no trouble raising $1 million for a publicly accessible space telescope, and the Smithsonian far exceeded the $500,000 it sought to conserve and display Neil Armstrong's and Alan Shepard's spacesuits. However, an effort by lunar pioneer Golden Spike to raise $240,000 fell short in its campaign.