Developer promises ‘lunar landscape’ in Las Vegas

What Henderson does have are $1 million in plans and models and a rented hotel ballroom where he’ll float his proposal on Thursday to see if anyone wants to buy it.

He doesn’t care where in the world the Moon rises. Here, or Europe, or may be Asia. He’s not even sure what he’ll personally get out of it. ‘‘I just want to see it built,’’ he said.

He sees crater-shaped swimming pools and a lunar lander lounge, moon buggy rides, a deep pool for weightlessness experiences, a giant casino inside a moon-like globe and a space shuttle to move folks around.

‘‘You have to think out of the box,’’ said Henderson, 40, who describes himself as independently wealthy after launching a string of lasik eye surgery centres before being fired as CEO by his medical staff.

‘‘Normally, it’s better to take an idea out to the highest-probability investors first, not to just show it to the whole world,’’ said Alan X. Reay, president of the Atlas Hospitality Group, a hotel consulting firm.

‘‘If I had a lot of money to invest, I wouldn’t want to read about this at the same time as everyone else. ‘‘Maybe he’s hoping to find some guy out there with more money than he knows what to do with,’’ Reay said.

Henderson said that his display model and other promotional materials fill a 40-foot-long truck, and are too unwieldy to ship across oceans. ‘‘There’s a very shrewd and very small group of people out there’’ who might be interested in Moon, Henderson said.

‘‘They’ll form an opinion of whether they like this or not, and we’ll live or die on that opinion. That’s our gamble. If we had just a couple of drawings and hoped to get an appointment with one of these people, we’d be lucky to just get past their private secretary,’’ Henderson said. ‘‘So we’re going to throw all our chips and see where they land.’’