Lunar Tourism: Catalyst for Jumpstarting a Cislunar Economy

The University of Southern California ASTE527 Graduate Space Concepts Studio within the Department of Astronautical Engineering and in the Graduate Space Architecture Seminar in the School of Architecture presented a lunar tourism paper.

Space Experience Tourism might be “low hanging fruit” that will spur on the development of a self-sustaining space economy in the near term, opening the doors to several other space applications that are waiting in the wing to make humanity a truly space-faring species.

The paper reviewed various lunar development and lunar tourism work like space taxis and orbital hotels and the use of lava tubes.

Nextbigfuture notes that the lunar development analysis needs to be adjusted to include the new SpaceX Super Heavy Starship.

54 thoughts on “Lunar Tourism: Catalyst for Jumpstarting a Cislunar Economy”

  1. Yes. This for sure.
    But what lunar holiday is complete without a stopover at the ISS?
    Have a Merry Christmas (or Solstice, etc)!

  2. I’m not disputing any of these facts, but the new rockets have all the aircraft safety knowledge to draw upon, and no weather along the way! They will only get safe with much more use, which may be slowed by other factors. But the safety seems possible to me.

  3. If an aircraft has a pressurisation problem – like the Aloha Airways one that lost its roof, or the one that had the pilot sucked halfway out the window – they can reduce altitude, and still land. If there are gear problems, they can dump fuel to land light, or circle for hours while the best airport to receive them is got ready. Jet turbine rotor tips are running up near failure temperatures for the metal, but with a re-entering rocket, much of the fuselage is in danger of vapourising, just from coming in at the wrong angle. Even sub orbital speed aircraft like the SR71 Blackbird, Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship One, or the Concorde, which have far less energy to burn off than a true space craft, have had a way higher failure rate than commercial jets.

  4. I suspect rockets to be as safe as *current* jets fairly easily, given the similarities. They will probably not keep up as jets advance. But the notion of reuse and short turn around was the question, and jets will have far more time in flight, so rockets may even be used on more flights per day, someday.

  5. “The desert or Antarctica are much better places than space, actually.”

    Well, aside from the soldiers who’d show up to remove you if you tried colonizing there, I actually agree. One of the major attractions of space is getting away from other people on Earth…

  6. Physical constraints on jets are much less demanding, and practical experience is thousands of times more extensive than for manned orbital flights. If commercial aviation had a death rate per person/trip like space travel has, there’d be a couple of Max-scale crashes every day.

  7. Living in an underground lunar habitat would be identical to living in a spinning orbital habitat, except for the 1/6 gravity. It would also be vastly safer (far fewer failure modes), and much cheaper and easier to expand, since new sections can be built on site from local materials rather than needing to be launched from Earth.

  8. ‘SDI won the Cold War.’
    If it did, if wasn’t by demonstrating any tech that would have won a hot war.

  9. Of course things will start with “conventional” systems. If you can consider living in a lava tube on the moon conventional to begin with. The thread started with all the inventiveness needed to get us to the moon in the first place – pretty crazy stuff from a cave man’s perspective. Maybe not so much from a cave woman’s perspective – always gotta push to make things better. There is no reason to suspect that the motive to invent will stop by moving back into a cave. It will actually be a very new environment and thus will require that we continue to innovate new solutions in order to make the best life possible. And to your point that they will be easier to develop on the earth – maybe so and these technologies can certainly be used to make life better here too, but new environments will inspire new thinking, so inventing “much much more” on the moon itself is inevitable.

  10. It always seemed to me that the main advantage of the moon is resource extraction and construction sites. It has gravity even if light, making possible Earth methods of mining and refining. It has close proximity to Earth, making telerobotic control feasible without building massive infrastructure to support a large human presence. It has almost everything (aluminum, iron, water, uranium, titanium, etc) the Earth has in resources so we can build things the same as on Earth. We can build factories there with no EPA worries.

    This should allow us to build ships large and powerful enough to support exploration and colonization of the rest of the solar system, ships large and shielded enough to remove concerns about radiation, instead of tin foil ships light enough to be launched from Earths gravity well. Nuclear rocketry, maybe even Orion drives or eventually fusion. O’Neill cylinders.

    I don’t see any of this happening without a government/private partnership to set up the initial infrastructure to grow from, and I fail to see how moon tourism will ever be able to replace that. What the heck though, go for it anyway!

  11. Interesting ideas, I’ll give you that. But I think it’s more likely we’ll go with conventional engineering at least in the near term. Lunar concrete and metal, hydroponics, conventional proven life support, etc.

    All the things you mention are just as easy, even easier, to develop on Earth (which is not to say that they are easy at all). And they’ll have to be tested before they’re deployed. Until then, we’ll still need the conventional systems.

  12. At about $10 million or more per trip I don’t see a big market for it. Maybe colonies for insane cults would be a better sell.

  13. The moon could provide raw material for processing in earth’s orbit. Delta V from the moon to earth orbit less than Delta V from Earth. Then there is He3 and Platinum metals. It could also be a good place to breed U233 for atomic rocket engines and space power supplies. No environment to mess up.

  14. No one lives in Moon Caves yet. When we do we will be inventing many new things to enhance living conditions. One thing the people will advance is printed CUISINE – meaning very tasty fine food that use locally available nutrients (perhaps protein powders made from insects or from microbes) in new creative ways. Making NEW foods – not the boring 3D printed pizza we’ve done already.

    With the tools that are becoming available now (CRISPR and others) I also imagine it to be possible to grow very useful things that do not exist now – imagine a gigantic tree root with a hollow center tens of meters in diameter, something that when fed water and nutrients and sunlight can grow down under the lunar surface. Such an organism can recycle C02 into Oxygen, bring water down to inhabitants inside it, provide other organic sustenance for people who will live in it. These are the things people will invent to make life on the moon worth living.

    I see you did not have a problem imagining 1/6 G gymnastics.

  15. Km in width doesn’t seem terribly likely, though the rock would, I suppose, be strong enough to support that size of ceiling under the gravity.

    Just going by the same proportions as Earthly lava tubes, only scaled up by a factor of 6, 180 feet tall and 300 feet wide would be plausible, that’s plenty big enough.

  16. That article is from 2016, with the old ITS design. The first picture says 1000 times per booster, but 100 times per ship. Pretty sure those numbers were even more aspirational then than they are now.

    I do believe they will get to high reuse numbers and high launch cadence, but it will take a while. They will barely be done with orbital tests in a couple years.

  17. ‘..they had an advocate in Jerry Pournelle. And that is good enough for me…’
    He was a big advocate for Star Wars -er, SDI, as well. I wonder how that turned out ?

  18. This is a reason I favor either Lunar Solar or L5 Solar rather than the GEO Solar Sats(100 times brighter per area). With H economy finally here, the need for continuous feed from GEO goes way down. Now, tourists will want to be close to Earth, but it seems to be best to get at least as far out as the Moon for most things.

  19. Be ready for astronomers to call them eyesores.
    Other than that they had an advocate in Jerry Pournelle. And that is good enough for me.

  20. Definitely for larger stations at least. For a 100-meter station I’m hoping somebody just launches the thing.

  21. Bear in mind that a single Starship will have more pressurized interior volume than ISS. The ISS has ‎915.6 cubic meters, and Starship will have about 1000. (See wikipedia entries for each.)

    So we might as well do the “layover” in Starship itself. If that doesn’t have enough room, ISS doesn’t either, unless you’re mostly carrying cargo to the moon with just a few passengers.

  22. My model:
    Start with chartered flights to ISS.
    Invest in operations at the lunar south pole. Habitats, rovers, and power. ISS will then be a layover.
    Let the tourists explore locations with a guide to collect geologic samples and take photos and video. Allow them to participate in site selection.
    Allow the tourists to bring home a limited amount of the collected samples.
    Keep a record of the locations of valuable specimens which have been collected. Follow up with geological surveys, and place infrastructure (claims) on the best locations for future industry.

  23. By the time we are ready to start building these structures, I would hope that they have already planned to source metals from lunar deposits. You should be able to get good Iron-Titanium alloys just by smelting and blending ilmenite.

  24. “We only really need lunar materials if we want larger habitats and/or radiation shielding. Then we need lunar mining and transport, and it’ll help to have people there. Building a lunar habitat in a lava tube helps us get large O’Neill colonies sooner.”

    Exactly. The primary purpose of the moon would be as a source of off-planet raw materials for construction. O’Neill colonies, SPS etc. Relatively few people would make the moon their permanent home. And given the existence of O’Neil colonies lunar inhabitants might rotate between “rehab” under earth like gravity and living on the moon; this might ameliorate the issues of living under low gravity permanently. Especially say for pregnant women/young children etc.

  25. Probably, but it remains to be seen if low g makes for crappy living condition as zero g for anything more than a vacation.

  26. Source is Musk’s recent Starship presentation. He said they planned to fly Starship three times per day, and Super Heavy thirty times per day, and that they could be reused a thousand times. Here’s a source to back that up: https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/27/13001590/mars-rocket-booster-announced-elon-musk-spacex

    Methane fuel is one reason they think they can turn it around quickly, along with the clean-burning Raptor engine design. In later articles Musk has said they think they can get Starship launch cost down to about $2 million.

  27. “launch will no longer be scarce”
    The stuff to launch is already scarce. I generally agree with the Musk rocket advantage over what we had expected just a few years ago. But the notion that launch has been solved is very small scale. The solution to launch, ISRU, is much easier, however, with these rockets. And I certainly have no problem with tourism, science or “getting started” launch.

  28. Last number I remember is 100 flights per starship, and so far even 10 flights per ship is aspirational (given that they haven’t even flown once, and no F9 or FH ever flew 10 times either). You have a source for that 1000 flights number?

    P.S. Also, that’s 100 flights over their entire lifetime, not per year. I highly doubt they’ll be flying every 3 days, let alone 3 times per day within only a couple years.

  29. I remember reading about a proposed private lunar sample return mission in the late 90s or early 2000s to do precisely that. Nothing came of it at the time.

  30. My larger point is, within a couple years launch will no longer be scarce. Each Starship will be able to launch a thousand times per year. Ten starships gives us a million metric tons to orbit, every year.

    The bulk of the expense will be the capital cost of the rockets. If they only fly ten times per year, then that cost is relatively high. If they actually fly a thousand times, then we really will get a launch cost of $20/kg payload to LEO.

    And that means, the more we do in space, the cheaper for everybody. O’Neill colonies do not compete with lunar colonies. The more we do in space, the cheaper the O’Neill colonies will be.

  31. Earth environments are natural habitats with life and protected by international agreements.

    We wouldn´t dare trying to “terraform” Antartica. Or even deserts. Because you “terraform” a desert here, it messes with an environment in a neighboring area.

  32. I suggest solving global heating and getting rich at the same time. Lunar Solar Power. Bezos is 99% of the way there, but perhaps is still into Solar Power Sats. L5 Solar similar to LSP, both better than GEO SPS. Big bucks for the big market-global energy.

  33. I do not want a small rotating station as fast as possible. I want global scale Space Solar as soon as possible. Just like O’Neill. Make bucks! The rest will be obvious, place to live and work, and such. What is obvious now is the immediate start of ISRU. I suggest Starships full of wet dirt from lunar poles to ELEO, rather than operations on Moon, but those are details. Easy launch helps O’Neill, global heating solved with SSP, mining moved to Space. ISRU. In Space.

  34. Woman live in moon cave too – woman invent new 3D printed cuisine, 1/6 G gymnastics, genetically engineered housing and much much more.

  35. Without money and rockets we have no say in it.

    This is Elon Musk’s and SpaceX’s show right now, and we are only spectators of it, I suggest to enjoy the ride and cheer.

    We can’t do anything else. Besides we could even get what we been wanting for long.

    This is something that Zubrin doesn’t seem to get either.

  36. The 100M design by Globus masses 8500 tonnes. Call it 100 Starship launches, costing about $200M once Starship is flying at scale. If you want a small rotating station as fast as possible, that’s the way.

    And it wouldn’t come close to saturating Starship fleet capacity. In fact, the more other things we’re doing at the same time, the more launches over which SpaceX can amortize Starship construction costs, so the cheaper it is to launch the Globus station. So we get the station cheaper if we’re also making lots of trips to space for Starlink, moon bases, and everything else we can think of.

    And of course at scale we need lunar or asteroid mining anyway. We’ll likely build the Globus design first, and if by the time that’s occupied we have people on the moon already, so much the better.

  37. Space travel and settlement are surrounded with some kind of daring romanticism or child-like wonderment. It’s like as if real life is suspended because we are in literally, another world.

    The desert or Antarctica are much better places than space, actually. But we are not writing novels and doing movies about the settlement of the Gobi desert, are we?

    This, I think, is an artifact of our culture’s youth and lack of experience with real space travel and living.

    I think we will come to realize pretty soon that the Moon, Mars, etc. are really, really bad places to live. With the appeal of space tourism remaining limited, until we really make it a much better place to be.

    But don’t get me wrong: once we can go, I think people will certainly go to make business, explore and just because they want. Regardless of the shortcomings of such places, even if the trips are temporary and limited to just accomplish some goal.

    The real settlement of space will start with the first medium to big rotating habitats. Where people can live with the same conditions of Earth and stay for good. The first small ones will also be temporary dwellings, but the benefits of gravity will soon become evident and convince everyone to make all their habitats like that.

    In general, I see all these efforts of going towards planets and Moons just as necessary steps in a longer road.

  38. Another idea for making $ from the moon would be to bring back moon rocks and sell them for $1,000 a piece. Quite the paperweight to have in the office for the Alpha-coder.

    I would buy one. I’m just a sucker that way.

  39. While the Starship is an excellent thing, it does not change O’Neill’s obvious truth, we can better live in Space than on a planet, such as Earth. That it is big means O’Neill can be started sooner/bigger, not that we can just launch everything. O’Neill thought is true at all scales, esp the Next Big Future scale we are all interested in seeing!

  40. While I support all means necessary to get lunar/asteroidal ISRU going, the initial goal should be ELEO, not lunar (or Mars!) UNLESS needed, and only AS needed. Probably very little human at first anywhere. Saying we need lunar settlement (or Mars!) before we start thinking O’Neill is the exact problem I have been addressing for over 40 years. The reason we did not start this 40 years ago? Mars fantasies.

  41. With Starship it wouldn’t cost that much to build a Globus-style station in LEO with all the materials from Earth. No need for mining infrastructure, just build parts at home, launch to LEO and bolt them together.

    We only really need lunar materials if we want larger habitats and/or radiation shielding. Then we need lunar mining and transport, and it’ll help to have people there. Building a lunar habitat in a lava tube helps us get large O’Neill colonies sooner.

  42. The Moon is a planet, like Mars. Start in Al Globus Equatorial Low Earth Orbit, as G. K. O’Neill would, using the Moon or small NEO for material. It is not that complicated once you realize that we can sooooo much easier live in Space.

  43. That last figure with the claim that lunar lava caves could be km in width is a claim I’ve missed up until now.

    The length is probably different too, but I can only guess in what way. My wild speculation is that given that lava flows under the effect of gravity, and given there is much less gravity, the flows will not go as far.

    I’ve only been in one lava tube myself, but it was 100 km long, which is long enough for a colony.

  44. Man lives in caves. Man invents fire, agriculture, writing, maths, metalwork, electronics, rockets. Man go to moon. Man live in moon cave.

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