[whack]

If space transportation costs were to fall dramatically, would there be any commercial value in traveling to the Moon, or building a base on the moon? The only one I can think of is Tourism. Are there any others, such as rare minerals perhaps?

[w-ll]

Andy Weir (author of The Martian) has a new book coming out that explores tourism to the moon. He has done a ton of research on the topic, definitely worth checking out.

He was recently on StarTalk Radio [1] give it a listen

1. https://www.startalkradio.net/tag/andy-weir/

[TrueGeek]

It just came out and is a great read. He goes into the issues of tourism, industry, and which countries will be driving efforts on the moon.

[baddox]

In the book, is the tourism is driven primarily by the inherent novelty and wonder of being on the moon, seeing Earth, experiencing the weaker gravity, etc., or is the draw primarily based on facilities that have been built there, like casinos, resorts, amusement parks, etc.?

My guess is that you would need to have a lot of the latter, because while the former would be undoubtedly cool, I’m afraid the novelty would wear off quickly if the living and entertainment facilities themselves were anything less than spectacular.

[classicsnoot]

This is a fascinating thoughtsploration. Tourism on the moon will be a real version of the Jurassic Park narrative concept:

Enterprising, wealthy, and somewhat eccentric genius opens space theme park, pushing the boundaries of the possible whilst simultaneously exposing your crew and visitors to near infinite risks because it has never been done before and is almost the definition of unnatural.

[amorphid]

If resurrecting dinosaurs via ancient DNA could possibly be a thing (pretty sure it can't), I wonder how big dinosaurs could get on the moon. I believe gravity was the limiting factor in how big land based dinosaurs could get, so how big could get in Lunar Jurassic Park in ~1/6th Earth gravity.

[qbrass]

Assuming mass scales linearly with volume, the cube root of 6 is 1.817ish

So moonisaurs would be roughly 82% larger if you just scaled them up until they weighed the same as they did on Earth.

It's a really sloppy estimate, but think more on the scale of twice their size on Earth than six times their size.

[baddox]

The low gravity is probably what I would have the most fun with. I can imagine all sorts of activities could get a lot more fun. I could learn to do a standing backflip, or even manage to finally break 400lb on my deadlift. :)

[nojvek]

Can't wait for humans to trash the moon with their plastic Cocacola bottles.

Also a manned mission to moon is a terrible use of Indian resources. Just send a one way robot and stay on the moon for years.

[arthulia]

The Moon has a fair bit of Helium-3. It sounds like that is partly what this mission is about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Extraction_from_extra...

[agumonkey]

I didn't know people were allowed to exploit the moon ..

[abecedarius]

If you want to build anything really big in space, lunar materials would be much cheaper to put there than materials from Earth. Asteroids might beat them both out, though.