Fly Me to the Moon: The Moon as a New Economic Frontier

Recently Pete Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research Center in California, addressed a group of physics students and faculty at the University of West Ontario. He suggested that private voyages to the Moon are just twenty years away.

General Worden, who previously wasinvolved in the Delta Clipper and Clementine projects for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and is thought by many to be in line to succeed Mike Griffin as NASA Administrator, is not given to hyperbole. He does have the crucial ability to think outside the box.

Dreams of commercial flights to the Moon are not new. When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon almost forty years ago, Pan Am, the airline depicted as flying space shuttles in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, actually sold tickets for future lunar flights. It was a publicity stunt, to be sure, and PanAm has long gone out of business. But the notion that ordinary people could just buy a ticket and voyage a quarter million miles to trod on a land where so far only twelve men have visited was not outside the realm of imagination, even then.

That Pete Worden, an official of NASA, an agency that until recently was not known for its friendliness to the commercial sector, would suggest such a thing indicates a seismic shift in thinking. "It's NASA's unstated policy that the moon is available for economic activity," Worden told the Canadian students and teachers. Therefore, not just a protected preserve for scientists like-say-Antarctica.

Worden's notion that private entrepreneurs will travel to the Moon a mere ten years after NASA astronauts return to it is not entirely unprecedented. That was, after all, the story of just about every frontier. First the explorers, then the merchants, and then the settlers.

The idea makes economic sense too. While NASA intends to return to the Moon in the tried and true way, by building specialized, expensive to operate space craft, it cannot hope to sustain a large presence on the Moon in that way. However, if private businesses start operating voyages to the Moon, market forces will inevitably drive down the cost, making a NASA lunar base cheaper to operate.