Moon Real Estate

Shortly after the first Moon landing in 20 July 1969, NASA had plans to establish a moon base in the 1970s and from there launch a manned flight to Mars as early as 1981. These were ambitious plans and, partly for that reason, they were soon abandoned.

From 1972 to 1994, the United States seemed to have forgotten about the Moon, not bothering to dispatch even an unmanned probe. So total has been the withdrawal from the Moon that when President Bush announced in January 2004 plans for a manned return flight to the Moon in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the first landing in 2019, the plans seemed overly optimistic.

NASA did send two unmanned probes, one in 1994 and another in 1998, to perform geological mapping and surveying programs of the Moon’s resources. In part, these probes were meant to pave the way for more active use of the Moon in the future.

There are still many unanswered scientific questions about the Moon, including its origin. The current theory that seems to best accommodate the available facts is that the Moon is the result of a collision between an asteroid nearly as big as Mars with the newly-formed Earth about 4.6 billion years ago. The cloud of material ejected from the original Earth later condensed to form the Moon. There is no doubt that subsequent forays to the Moon will perform more experiments to try finding the answers to the scientific questions.

Many imaginative entities are taking a more commercial view of the Moon. Thirty years ago after the Apollo landings, enterprising companies started accepting reservations for the first commercial Moon flight. It is only now that commercial spaceflights are being realized. A number of paying astronauts have already been to the International Space Station, each of them paying $20 million for the flight (including preparatory training).

These recent events do not mean that you or I soon go orbiting around the Earth, or even land on the Moon, but the chances are good that our children will. In September 2004, Sir Richard Branston made quite a stir when he said that he expected to fly a space liner with paying passengers in 2007. Tourism as we know it in space may still be some ways off, but the feeble beginnings are here and are provoking necessary changes in how we approach space travel.

Humans will soon exploit space, and we must attain the capability to send ordinary people to work in space with a minimum of special training. That means spaceflight must be as routine as today’s transatlantic flights — and as affordable. Then, the Space Age will really have arrived.

The Moon has enormous potential, as a scientific observation station and as an industrial base. Scientists could operate optical and radio telescopes from the Moon and see farther into the universe than is now possible. Industries could exploit the Moon’s resources. The uninterrupted daylight on the Moon’s side facing the Earth makes it an ideal site for generating solar power. The silicon-rich soil and the substantial presence of titanium (lunar rocks have as much as 11 percent titanium) raise possibilities of producing valuable ores on the Moon. With industrial operations, there will be need for human settlements on the Moon.

It may well be that in the next few decades the Moon will become the most sought-after piece of real estate in our solar system.