spacester
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Mech_Engineer said:To make your "plan" to colonize the Moon and Mars cost-effective, you need to find a valuable resource (hopefully very, very valuable) that can be mined and/or produced on them but cannot be found/produced on Earth. For example, the first thing that I think of when "mining" and "the Moon" are mentioned together is Helium-3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3). I'm not sure what you could mine on Mars however, perhaps some rare minerals or something.
Overall just returning soil/rock samples of the moon and/or Mars would never cover costs, because the more you returned the less valuable it would become. By the time they were colonized, their dirt would be worthless (where as right now they're basically priceless).
Hello, my fellow ME.
Years ago, I figured out the resource on the moon that will drive the killer app that makes commercial activity on the moon a reasonable business proposition.
I do not know how many posts I've made to reveal and explain this answer to our space development conundrum. I have approached the subject every way I know. But the next person who gets it will feel like the first. It's not like people argue against it, they invariably ignore it. I consider this a failure on the part of my personality, not of the resource statement itself.
What can you do on the moon that has very very high value and that cannot be had on Earth or elsewhere? Physical substances, whether manufactured or merely gathered, cannot possibly meet these criteria, certainly not at anywhere near today's cost of transportation.
There is only one answer: The Experience of Being There.
Space Tourism is such a lame term for the kaleidoscope of human activity on the Moon for which people will receive value and pay good money. Doing things on the moon would be the fulfillment of the dreams of the ancients, and if you cannot market that you cannot market anything.
So we can go and do science and extract water and oxygen and make structures from local resources. But nobody is willing to "fund" such activity just for the sake of doing it. It MUST be an investment, one that will see at least some value returned to someone sometime and all those to a degree where a significant number of investors jump on board.
So we need to set up a lunar industrial park with a singular purpose: to learn how to build facilities to host visitors who pay good money for experiences. Once we learn how, we build those facilities and exploit them for revenue and close the financial loop.
Note that this strategy need not wait for actual humans to show up. Think lunar rover rentals, operated by customers using PCs at home.