William Stone (born December 7, 1952), known as Bill Stone, is an American caver and explorer, known for exploring deep caves, sometimes with remotely operated vehicles. He has participated in over 44 international expeditions, and is President and CEO of Stone Aerospace.[1]
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Stone was an active caver in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Outing Club[2] while studying for a B.S. in Civil Engineering, awarded in 1974.[3]
After obtaining a Ph.D. in Engineering, he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland from 1980–2004.[4] While at the institute, Stone established the Construction Metrology and Automation Group. He led the group for seven years, before stepping down to focus on projects at Stone Aerospace.[4][5]
In 1998, Stone directed an international group of explorers consisting of over 100 volunteers to participate in the Wakulla 2 Project. Upon securing a permit from the State of Florida the expedition began mapping the cave of Wakulla Springs, near Tallahassee, Florida.[6]
Stone has developed a highly advanced AUV, DepthX, to explore the world's deepest caves.[7] This has evolved into a new and entirely separate project with Professor Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago named Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE); it is funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation, with the goal of exploring Lake Bonney in the Antarctic .
One of Stone's underground adventures (in the storied Sistema Huautla in Oaxaca, Mexico) is chronicled in his book, Beyond the Deep: The Deadly Descent Into the World's Most Treacherous Cave (2002),[8] which he co-authored with Barbara am Ende and Monte Paulsen. Stone also figures prominently in James Tabor's book Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth (2010), [9] which discusses his contribution to extreme caving and summarizes many of Stone's caving expeditions most notable those to Huatla and Cheve.
Recently, Stone has been involved with developing a next-generation LIDAR system for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as with the DepthX program at NASA, which seeks to develop a robot to autonomously scour the seas of Jupiter's moon Europa for signs of microbial life.[10]
In 1987 Bill Stone became known to the wider diving community when he demonstrated the MK1 model rebreather at Wakulla Springs, Florida in a scuba dive that lasted 24 hours.[11]
Bill Stone gave a talk at TED 2007 about exploring the world's deepest caves and frontier space travel. In the talk, Stone pledges his devotion to lead a mining expedition to the moon "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."[12]