Private companies will launch a new fleet of moon landers

> I assume the biggest risk on landing is that you risk losing balance, is that what you need better shoes, so you're more tolerant to a bad foot position on landing?

That's my honest guess. Also, I'm pointing out another Earth-based market opportunity, viz Nike Moonshoes.

The moon is really small, visually - half a degree in diameter. That's the size of a dime at six feet, likely means such billboards would not be noticeable enough to be worth the effort.

Much cheaper to build smaller ones in closer orbits, and you are not limited to just one big one (that will be covered up by some other wag by a smaller billboard in a closer orbit).

Or broadcasting. No pesky national rules regarding power output or content.

As quickly as football?

That’s what all you earthlings say :P

Hmm, I think disease, poverty, and lack of access to healthcare are less serious problems now than at any previous point in human history, even though covid has killed more than 4.69 million people so far, and probably closer to 20 million. (By way of comparison, cancer and coronary artery disease kill almost 9 million people a year each. Diarrhea kills 1.3 million.) So if those are your standards, then on four of the five axes you mention—climate change, disease, poverty, healthcare access, and moonball—this would count as a utopia rather than a dystopia.

Climate change is a pretty big deal, though, and it could undo all the dramatic advancements we've made in space travel, healthcare access, and fighting disease and poverty.

There are hundreds of millions of people right now who look at the people in the First World as living lives akin to moon billionaires.

If your goal for a just world is "nobody is ever unhappy or jealous of another person" then that is a very, very high bar to clear.

It's easier to do that kind of thing on the moon, though, which is the color of asphalt and has almost no atmosphere. If you can manage ISRU, you could sputter a layer of quicklime onto the regolith from a lunar rover; if you fountain the molecules out the top of the rover, you could spread them over an almost arbitrarily large part of the moon. (Maybe a different abundant white mineral with a lower boiling point would be more practical.) If your pixels were 20 km square and 10 microns thick they would only require 13000 tonnes of quicklime each.

Thanks. Picture for anybody else curious:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicus_(lunar_crater)#/m...

Nothing a series of nukes couldnt solve.

>This trope has to die.

It's not a trope. It's just time has moved on.

> The government landed on the moon and drove around it 50 years ago.

Yes, this was amazing. And then gov't got bored and cut the funding. Back then, there was no private money large enough to do this without gov't funding. Now, the economy has gotten to where it is that private individuals have more worth than some nation states.

The Gemini, Mercury, Apollo missions paved the way. Now, private companies are picking up where gov't stopped. Robots are fine for first missions.

>The greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody else within an order of magnitude, are a US government agency, NASA.

That's great, but there's more that could be done. Robots are great first expeditions, but what would have happened if the great explorers of old only sent drones but no people followed? There would be no NASA.

Sure, start with the easy government money, but once you get a track record, you get non-gov't customers.

The bases in Antarctica are important because once there is a clear economic incentive, the Antarctic Treaty will end and each country will try to grab a piece. You can let the morons build bases there and nuke them at the last second, but it's more friendly to keep a few bases and use that as a antecedent to pick your part when the negotiations starts.

Would there be a commercial benefit for an earth orbit station? I believe not at current prices, otherwise companies would have launched one.

As soon as you consider private investment (as opposed to essentially charity funding of pure research/exploration), then looking at analogies vs an Antarctic site or deep ocean site may be quite relevant - those are also sites that are somewhat difficult to reach and build on but easier than Moon on Mars; so for any commercial argument in the form of "mining resources" there has to be an answer why suffer the difficulties on the moon instead of (lesser) difficulties in Antarctica.

All the resource questions essentially may make building the base cheaper by sourcing some materials locally and bootstrapping, but it does not answer the main question about the economic purpose of the base. What benefit exactly does having that base give back to whoever built it; who wants to pay for the existence of that base and why?

Insofar that the base provides materials and experience for building future bases, that just postpones answering the real question - what exactly is the expected benefit from those future bases?

Because the exact answer matters a lot for any discussions on where and how to do things.

If the eventual answer is "research and exploration", then suddenly it's very important to consider exact needs of the sponsors of that research which can't be done on earth - e.g. if it's zero-g research, then a moon base doesn't help that and you need orbit, no matter what the cost difference is.

If the eventual answer is "eternal glory to the sponsor", which arguably was the goal which funded a big part of the space race, certainly more than any pure scientific goals, then the appropriate metric is some sort of "PR per dollar" ratio, and there a Moon base probably wins over orbital bases simply because orbital bases have been built but a Moon base has not.

If the eventual answer is "make humanity interplanetary", then suddenly it's very important to consider what exactly the sponsors of that social project want (because in that scenario that's a subsidized colony that exists to fulfil the desires of some Earth people/organization spending resources to allow it to exist), but in any case it would look like that an orbital base likely does not fill that need and neither does Moon except as support for a potential Mars base, so again the cost difference doesn't matter because the other options simply don't fill the need.

If the eventual answer is "because it will be commercially self-sustaining" then that would need an explanation of what resources exactly would be cheaper to mine from there (at great cost and difficulty) for the purposes of Earth (because any non-Earth uses go right back to question of why would Earth fund those uses instead, they're just a discount on that purpose) as opposed from existing resources, or ocean floor, or Antarctica, etc because with current technology (hopefully changing due to Starship et al), if there were pallets of processed gold bars sitting on a prepared landing pad on the Moon, it would not be worth the cost to fly there to pick them up, much less ship mining equipment to do anything realistic.