Have I got some real estate to sell you

Sure, the view is great, but the commute is a bitch.

As usual, story here. Snip below.


Humankind's presence on the moon was never supposed to be some boring public works project. It certainly wasn't supposed to be a failed one. When the easing of Cold War tensions and the economic disaster of the 1970s took the wind out of the Apollo missions, the dream of domed cities and low-gravity industrial parks died too.

The moon remained a vacant lot in a bad neighborhood – until last month, when TransOrbital Inc. became the first private company granted government permission to explore, photograph and land there. What's fueling this moon rush is not just a juicy balance sheet, but a pulp fantasy version of the frontier. Rather than belonging to the Earth, lunar soil would belong to whoever staked a claim and had the best business model.

"It is necessary for humankind to move off-planet, and in the near future, if we are not to stagnate," TransOrbital executive Paul Blase says. And if the moon isn't turned into a commercial space, "then we are limiting ourselves to an observational presence only ... This will be only signing a suicide pact."

TransOrbital's Trailblazer mission, slated to launch in the next nine to 12 months from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, seems to lack the cachet to save industrial civilization from imminent collapse. For $2,500, you can send a lock of your hair or a business card up on the ship. The launch vehicle has room for corporate logos on its side (think NASCAR, but faster) for $25,000 and up. TransOrbital will license high-definition footage of the moon and daily Earthrise to the movies. Baldly commercial and on a shoestring, Trailblazer replaces the old NASA goals of scientific research and military advantage with a new goal of profit-seeking, and over the long term, homesteading on lunar soil.

Okay, first things first. The manned missions to the moon weren't a failure; we actually did land men on the moon and being them safely to Earth. Whether this was a economically justified project during the War on Poverty is another matter. The space program emboldened the human spirit, pioneered new technologies and inventions (albeit borne out of the Nazi rocket project and expanded under the Cold War nuclear missile program) and served as a safe, by-proxy game of one-upmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

But it wasn't a failure.

Second, nothing is stopping us from going into space. As you read this, various nations have gotten together to built, operate and expand on an orbiting space station. We haven't gone back to the moon because, well, we've already been there. Instead, we are setting our sights on Mars. We've sent probes and roving Tonka trucks and all sorts of doodads to the red planet trying to learn more about our neighbor. Frankly, that's the smart move: Explore first, travel second.

Third, there's something economically silly about strip-mining the moon (the disasters can be seen in the mediocre remake of "The Time Machine") and divving up space to the first corporations that can plant a flag on some airless rock. Plus, there's the business side of things: One of the pie-in-the-sky proposals about having businesses on the moon (sheesh, talk about your off-shore bank accounts) is to manufacture integrated circuits. It's a vacuum on the moon, after all, and perfect for "clean rooms," sterile environs where delicate circuits can be assembled without fear of contamination.

One problem: Shipping. You have to make the circuits so damn cheap to outset how much it'll cost to build the circuits and then transport them back to Earth. It's a related problem to the idea of shipping moon rocks or asteroid fragments. They may not weight a lot when you gather them, but they will play havoc with your ship's weight when you try to land back on Earth.

Look, I'm not against the idea of colonizing the moon, the most likely lily pad we'll one day use to hop onto Mars and then deeper into space. I think what's giving me that cold, unholy feeling running into the pit of my stomach is the idea that the moon is, well, just another chunk of land. We've lost the wonder of interplanetary travel and now see this heavenly body, the source for lunatics, love-struck poets and the rest of us awe-struck earthbound dwellers, as a hunk of mass ripe for the picking. Here, check out this paragraph from the story and you'll see what I mean.

Setting up shop in the heavens is perfectly legal, and perfectly American. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 barred nations from owning property upstairs but left companies with an all-clear. Later, the 1979 United Nations Moon Treaty declared Earth's satellite part of the Common Heritage of Mankind, exploitable only for the mutual benefit of all nations. But the U.S. and the Soviet Union never signed on.

See, there's that loophole, that twisting of the words that allow men hungry for a profit to see the moon through their parallax of greed as the next Park Avenue when, in fact, the moon belongs to all of us. Even during the height of the Space Race, when the United States successfully landed men on the moon, there was an understanding that this remarkable, historic action wasn't done in the name of jingostic showboating. Or to make a profit.

Let's hope that the first corporation on the moon sets down near the Apollo 11 landing site and is greeted with the words left on that airless rock by a group of men and women united in the pursuit of science and the unleashing of the human spirit and imagination.