The plan to send a man back to the moon has been scrapped since at 150 billion dollars, that’s just too expensive. But there’s a rogue program within NASA that claims to be able to send a ROBONAUT (robotic astronaut, in case you haven’t pieced that together) up there for 250 million and do it within the next 1000 days.

The idea, known as Project M, is almost a guerrilla effort within NASA, cooked up a year ago by Stephen J. Altemus, the chief engineer at Johnson. He tapped into discretionary money, pulled in engineers to work on it part time, and horse-traded with companies and other NASA units to undertake preliminary planning and tests. “We’re doing impossible things with really very little, if any, money whatsoever,” Mr. Altemus said.

We wouldn’t even have to bring ROBONAUT back. He’d just stay up there. Die there. Poignantly.