Commentary: Key to Lunar Settlement is Profitability

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Doug Messier
on July 15, 2009, at 1:15 pm
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Return to the Moon: Unless it’s profitable, it won’t be permanent
Ronald Bailey
Reason Magazine

The Apollo moon landings have often been compared to the explorations of Christopher Columbus and the Lewis and Clark expedition to Oregon. For example, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush declared, “From the voyages of Columbus to the Oregon Trail to the journey to the Moon itself: history proves that we have never lost by pressing the limits of our frontiers.”

But what boosters of the moon expeditions overlook is that the motive for pressing the limits of our frontiers in those cases was chiefly profit….

In his report from his first voyage, Columbus predicted that his explorations would result in “vast commerce and great profit.” The extension of commerce was also the chief justification that President Thomas Jefferson gave in his secret message to Congress requesting $2,500 to fund what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Forty years later, as we bask in the waning prestige that the Apollo missions earned our country, we must keep in mind that humanity will some day colonize the moon and other parts of the solar system, but only when it becomes profitable to do so.

Read the full essay.

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  • http://lunarnetworks.blogspot.com Joel Raupe

    And if it be profitable (about which I have no doubt) there will be no stopping the colonization of the Moon, which I hold to be essential to colonization beyond the Moon, as well.

    We may well have to be content to be the tract writers, like those who promoted “The New World” who, though never having been and likely doomed never to go themselves, urged hundreds of thousands to go.

    Though I agree profit is essential (and also manifest) there takes a common though particular kind of people to up and leave kith and kin to make their way in New Worlds, facing certain hardship and perhaps never to return. Unfortunately pioneers are not made up of those supremely adapted 500 people who have traveled to and returned from space.

    If this is the age of Columbus, with tract writers and risk takers to follow, much time will pass before cities can survive on the Moon. It takes a kind of High Civilization, largely rewarding of those least maladaptive, to begin. It will take the discontented, however, to complete. Pioneers are not usually those who are more happy where they are. They are, on the whole, the maladaptive, the disinherited, the draft and tax evader, etc.

    And there is profit in risking and winning new fortunes, a chance to begin again, to start fresh after a spoiled run. It takes many such people to make a Mass Movement. Will the Social Order from which such people are maladapted and alienated facilitate their migration? Will such people gain approval to make their migration?

    The past five hundred years show such people are necessary also to colonize new worlds, for those at home in the present don’t abandon a good standing within an existing social order. Astronauts are not generally chosen from among the maladaptive.