Shackleton Energy Company

Shackleton Energy Company was an American space-resources startup founded in 2007 and based in Del Valle, Texas (near Austin), by cave-diving engineer and Stone Aerospace founder Bill Stone, together with Dale Tietz and Jim Keravala. The company's business plan centred on mining water ice believed to exist in permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's south pole — a region named for Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — and processing it into hydrogen/oxygen rocket propellant to be sold from propellant depots in low Earth orbit and on the lunar surface, reducing the cost of sending spacecraft beyond LEO.

Shackleton Energy proposed a multi-stage development plan involving robotic prospecting missions, habitat and mining equipment deployment, and eventually crewed lunar polar operations, but it never conducted any hardware missions. The company incorporated independently in March 2011 and launched a crowdfunding campaign that November seeking $1.2 million; the campaign raised less than $6,000, under 1% of its target. A further funding round planned for early 2013 was not secured, and the company has had no public milestones or news coverage since the mid-2010s.

Shackleton Energy Company is defunct; it never built or flew any mining or propellant-production hardware, and existed only at the concept and business-planning stage.