Making a quick buck on the moon

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. 

Grab a free copy of “The Moon Before Mars”

This week, to mark the forty-eighth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, you can grab a free copy of my Kindle ebook “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars” from now through Friday, July 21.  I see returning to the moon and setting up a permanent base/colony as our best bet for a foundation to build on making humanity a spacefaring civilization. 

What too few seem to understand about fossil fuels

Recently, I had a bit of back-and-forth with a couple of guys on Facebook about fossil fuels vs. solar.  I didn’t think of this analogy at the time, but they seemed to put all our energy eggs into one basket of fossil fuels and nuclear.  When I suggested diversifying our energy sources by moving one egg over to solar energy, they treated me like a raving lunatic for even suggesting such blasphemy.  They started talking about that being a waste of resources, as if all the bricks and steel and money would be piled in the desert as some sort of modern art sculpture instead of building a power plant that would produce electricity indistinguishable from that produced by a coal or nuclear power plant.  I’m sure they thought they had a point, I just don’t know what it was.  I stopped replying because it was getting into the “arguing with idiots” area and one sort of hinted that since I didn’t share his belief in the glorious future of fossil fuels, I must be a socialist. 

In reality, I’m a realist.  For example, I know that Earth is finite, meaning there is a finite supply of oil, coal, and natural gas that we are rapidly burning through.  (Yes, there are some geological processes that are making more, but for every new barrel of oil the Earth makes we probably burn a few tens of billions.)  This means that – if nothing changes – there are only two possibilities.  The first is we squeeze every last bit of oil, coal, or gas from the ground.  The second is that there is still some left, but it is so deep or in such hard to reach locations that we can’t extract it at any profit.  Which means that at that point in time, even Ayn Rand would need to convert to a non-fossil fuel energy system. 

The Age of Fossil Fuels will end.  There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that.  There are only two questions: when will it happen, and will humans be smart enough to move over to an alternate power source before then.  Because if we run out of fossil fuels or they stop being economically viable before we have an alternative, that will lead to a mad scramble.  Economically, mad scrambles tend to be rather expensive, and socially they can be violent.  Common sense would seem to indicate trying to avoid them.

How do we avoid the mad scramble when fossil fuels run out?  By starting to build the alternative energy infrastructure now.  Every day we hem and haw or say things like “There’s enough oil for fifty years, that means we don’t have to worry about running out for forty-nine years,” we get a day closer to the economy ruining, bloody scrambling, human civilization ending(?) moment our children, or our children’s children run out of fossil fuels.  And I’m sure they will be proud their ancestors didn’t “waste” resources building something silly like a solar power station.