Just the other day I finished the excellent novel by Andy Weir, 2017’s Artemis and in the back he has a great little essay on the economics of the city state on the Moon, the titular Artemis. He compares the startup costs of the Lunar industry to the airline industry, with a few assumptions that yes companies would seek profits on the Moon and that there would be workarounds for various technological hurdles which might be present to get a round trip to Luna at scale. That being said, he postulates that with his own napkin math that it might cost give or take 70,000$ (2015 numbers, or about 91,000 in 2024) for a vacation on the Moon with the way he envisions it. The natural question is, would you pay 70,000$ for a vacation on the Moon?
Now, I’m one of those people who can say that yes, absolutely I would pay that much for a Lunar vacation. I think that despite the cynical view that the Moon is a vast, airless, desert, people forget just how much is paid on Earth for the novelty of seeing actual deserts or the great wet desert of Antarctica. Seeing a place where we can take excursions to see history (such as the sites of the Moon landing, or whatever firsts we embark on in the coming decades) would be well worth their weight in cash.
Tourism alone could provide a pretty thriving industry, both in Low and Near Earth Orbit, taking people to orbital hotels (another thing people would pay for) and perhaps from there to the Moon itself. That would set the stage for infrastructure in orbit both at Earth and the Moon. That means things like fuelling stations, living quarters for workers, repair stations, ports of entry, and even small scale food production to feed these hungry mouths in space. That means things like algae farms alongside fish farms and other space agricultural capacities that need to be created and maintained.
Imagine Disneyland, but on the Moon! Space parks where you can play around in Lunar gravity, do some extreme sports and athleticism in the 1/6th gravity, among a litany of other activities. People would pay out the nose to engage in the dangerous activity of a space walk, just to say ‘hey I walked on the Moon’ which, cannot lie, would be really damn cool for bragging rights. Initially this would be the domain of the ultra rich, but over time as costs could be stabilised, you could – with some effort as I said and Weir expands upon – save up to bring your family to the Moon for a two week vacation!
The tourist industry is part of what formed the background of my piece of flash fiction 2069 and then led to my writing Islands in Space to imagine what a developed Lunar industry and society might look like at the dawn of the 22nd century when we want to build big in orbit. In the background you have purely government run space enterprises at large bases on the Lunar north and South poles, but also private cities partially run by private/public partnerships to put workers and tourists from Earth onto the Moon. That combination of public and private interest is, in my humble opinion, how you get people living and working on the Moon.
Naturally, the state interest is going to be in both scientific endeavour and defence, setting up labs and probably secret military posts on Luna. The private interest is going to be in manufacturing and tourism, getting some lucrative cash on mining Lunar resources and potentially shipping them back down to Earth, or using them to expand our presence in space and orbit. It’s way cheaper to move finished goods from the Moon to orbit than it is from vice versa. That’s where the first set of what we might call a “triangle trade” could develop. Foodstuffs and finished goods from Earth come up with tourists, develop the economy, and contracts, materials and scientific date come down from the Moon to Earth.
Ultimately it’s going to be far closer to home we develop our space industry first. Stories like Gunpowder Moon, Artemis and the Luna Trilogy, explore the Moon as a developing economy. While in future stories like The Expanse or 2312 the Moon is already a developed and integral part of the Solar System’s economy, we are in the infancy our stepping out of Earth and to the stars. The first stepping stone is the Moon, and these are the little ideas I have of how we’re ultimately going to go forward there.
Matthew Stienberg 