Over
the years I’ve written several posts – and an ebook – about why I support
returning to the moon over rushing off to Mars.
The basic reason boils down to money.
Setting up a lunar base/colony will be expensive, but then in a decade
or two resources and new businesses will return the investment with
interest. Setting up a Mars base/colony
will be even more expensive, and hopefully billionaires on Earth keep funneling
money into to. Because outside of
genuine Mars rocks to be sold to museums and collectors and tchotchkes stamped
“Made on Mars” there’s nothing on Mars that will be worth exporting.
These
are all thoughts I’ve had for some time, but I started wondering what would be
the first business to make money on the moon?
If we can figure out the engineering challenges to beam energy from
solar collectors around the moon to Earth, that’s untold billions in profits
right there. But it will take a few
decades to hammer the bugs out of the – mostly – autonomous mining, processing,
manufacturing, and emplacing of the solar panels. What businesses could make money with the
first return missions to the moon?
Outside
of the money private companies will make sending rovers and government
astronauts to the moon, the first money making ventures will be small. These will be genuine moon rocks bought by
museums and collectors on Earth, shooting ads, or maybe some company will want
to archive some data completely off-grid.
None of these will pay for setting up a lunar base. They will just be exploring the ways to make
money on the moon.
Probably
the one business that will make the most money the quickest will be
tourism. I had assumed that Phase I of a
lunar base would just be a pure scientific outpost figuring out how to live on
the moon, but Phase II of the base might include a hotel. But then I realized that a hotel at a
scientific outpost probably isn’t that great.
Yes, you’d be on the moon, but there wouldn’t be that much you could
do. You could put on a spacesuit and go
walk where … dozens of other people have walked in the area right around the
base.
The
solution would be to just skip the hotel – until there is enough infrastructure
and population to support playing fields for lunar sports, for example – and go
with a rover. Over the years there have
been hundreds of ideas for improved lunar rovers. Instead of little golf carts like some of the
Apollo missions had, these would be
enclosed habitats that you would drive to some spot and then put on your spacesuit
and walk around where no one has been before.
Some of these rovers are also the rocket that lands you on the moon and
lets you take off again. It’s a lot of
extra weight to lug around, but it means if there’s an accident you don’t have to
drive a hundred kilometers back to where you landed to take off again. Ideally, these rovers would dock with a space
station in lunar orbit where they’d be refueled and sent back down. These would be ideal for scientists to
explore new areas of the moon and for prospectors to find the resources to
start building lunar industry. And they
would be perfect for tourists. Instead
of spending most of your time on the moon in a cramped room with a screen
showing you camera views from around the base, you could spend your time in a
cramped rover with a window with an ever changing view.
The
moon contains untold riches and opportunities; it will just take time to develop
them. Letting tourists take their own “small
steps” may be the way to buy that time.
