FUTURE HUMAN
Are Moon Colonies Possible — or the Fantasy of Billionaires?
The economy of lunar mining and tourism
Growing up, my brother and I couldn’t get enough of Space: 1999, a mid-’70s series that hypnotized us with cool special effects, the crush-worthy Barbara Bain, who acted alongside her real-life husband Martin Landau, and its portrayal of the Moon as the main character in an action-packed 48-minute weekly episode. The premise of the show is bit far-fetched: an explosion at a moon base knocks the Moon out of Earth’s orbit and into a voyage to explore strange new worlds across the galaxy. The show was set a mere 15 years in the future.
It’s a reminder that in those post-Apollo years, we fully expected NASA or some international space force to be working on space bases in real life. More than four decades later, we’re still waiting for our Moonbase Alpha — though that’s not for a lack of interest. Ex-astronauts, entrepreneurial dreamers and short-lived sci-fi shows like Space: 1999 have kept alive the dream of a moon colony, and now, the confluence of technology, money, and political interest is pushing this idea out of the realm of sci-fi and closer to reality.
In my interviews with space scientists, industry officials, and futurists it appears that there’s an unofficial blueprint…
