Low-cost housing would be designed to host the necessary support personnel. We would establish giant lunar parks for leisure and relaxation. However, access is certain to change over time once low-cost space transport systems are developed. Their appetite for new forms of tourism seems insatiable. The Moon will initially be a playground for the super-rich. Lunar mining may provide an effectively limitless supply of rare earth elements Buggy rides on the lunar soil, or regolith. Such a hugely commercial activity, with vast potential returns, is attracting some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs on our planet. Tourist lunar landings may now seem pure fantasy, but the will is there. Tickets are already being sold by the likes of SpaceX for launches planned within five years. Today’s overwhelming demand will be addressed initially with orbital trips around the Moon. But there is a pent-up demand for luxury tourism. Transport for the first decades of human lunar travel will be expensive. The Moon offers dazzling new horizons for leisure and sports activities. Many commercial activities are already on the drawing board, spearheaded by space agencies and the private sector alike. Space exploration is our destiny, but we can only fulfil it, only discover the deepest mysteries of our Universe, by first returning to the Moon.
Where did we come from? And are we alone in this vast Universe? The resulting lunar infrastructure will open the way to building powerful telescopes that will provide new vistas into key questions that have long obsessed humanity. Several countries are involved, largely motivated by commercial prospects. We’ll achieve this by constructing novel telescopes of unprecedented scope in dark lunar craters and on the far side of the Moon.Īs it happens, driven by a desire for extraterrestrial tourism and a new frontier for resources, we are returning to the Moon in force. Only from the lunar surface can we mount the ultimate search for our origins. It is an essential first step to exploration of the distant Universe. Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon since Apollo 17 brought Eugene Cernan to the surface on 12 December 1972. When you get right down to it, despite our dreams of travelling far, the orbiting body next door, the Moon, is our next real target – and the true portal to the cosmos at large. Since the long voyage to Mars is currently too dangerous for crewed travel, robotic exploration there will likely dominate for several decades to come.īut one celestial body is now within reach for human exploration and exploitation: the Moon. The trip to Mars would expose travellers to lethal levels of radiation, which engineers and astrobiologists are hoping to mitigate eventually. The landscape is arid, and Martian dust is especially toxic. Mars may loom in our collective imaginations as the next world out, but prospects for humans living there are actually dim. There’s a global drive to develop the Red Planet, Mars, where proposals include human outposts, tourism, and an intensive search for ancient life. Closer to home, we’ll soon be excavating the icy moons of Jupiter for life in watery realms. The search is on for an Earth-like exoplanet in a solar system light-years away. From Blue Origin and SpaceX, to the new James Webb Space Telescope, to space agencies worldwide, we’ve set our sights on distant worlds.
0 kommentar(er)
