Lunar Markets

Lunar Markets

Jon Goff at Selenian Boondocks wrote about Lunar Markets, and he has some interesting ideas there about tourism, a foreign astronaut corps, platinum group metals, and in-situ resource utilization. I think that he has missed some interesting and potentially very lucrative lunar markets.

Vice Tourism

This is closely related to Jon's ideas on tourism. He was talking about getting the cost of a ticket to the moon down to the $1 million to $5 million range per seat. What he didn't go into is why people would go there as tourists (beyond the because-they-want-to motive).

What makes places like Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Monte Carlo, and Amsterdam vacation destinations? In short, vices: gambling, drugs, prostitution, and the like are things that polite society tends to frown upon, but for which there is a definite demand. Put them all together into one exotic location, far from the clutches of earthly governments, and you have a place that people would spend one to five million dollars per seat to which to travel.

Offshore Banking

The moon has the potential to be the ultimate offshore bank. The physical isolation of the moon and the lack of jurisdiction of terrestrial governments would allow the moon to escape the regulations and taxes that plague terrestrial banks. The vast area of the surface (four times that of the United States) makes hiding the lunar equivalent of Fort Knox that much easier - a burglar cannot break into a bank that he can't find.

Secure Data Backup

Data centers on the earth are subject to any number of natural disasters: wildfires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, ice storms. A data center on the moon would be immune from most of those disasters, as the moon is a geologically (or I guess that would be selenologically) quiescent body and has no atmosphere to cause such disturbances. Granted, the moon is subject to a different class of natural disasters, such as meteor strikes or coronal mass ejections, but the effects of these can be somewhat mitigated against by placing the data storage facilities deep under the surface.

Such data backup centers could also function as data havens, since they would be outside the jurisdiction of terrestrial governments.

Now, in the above examples, I do not mean to show ways that the moon could be used for evil purposes. People might view things like gambling or drugs or offshore banks as evil things, but in and of themselves they are not. For many of these things, it is the illegality that provides the profit margin to organized crime syndicates - and it is those crime syndicates which bring with them the violence, which is evil in and of itself. I am simply trying to show that there are ways to make a profit, to build the cislunar economy, that have nothing whatsoever to do with space, other than that space is a government-less frontier.

Update: I want to make it clear that I personally would most likely not be involved in any of the businesses that I mention above. Instead, I want to open the first pizza place on the moon. I'd call it Moon Pies.

Technorati Tags: Space, Moon, gambling, drugs, prostitution, Offshore Banking, Data Storage, Data Havens