As Nasa plans to return to the Moon with Project Artemis, ‘The Martian’ author Andy Weir explains how economics will shape the building of a long term lunar base
Well we’re here you know celebrating the 50th anniversary of humanity setting foot on the moon but also it’s been 47 years since humanity last set foot on the moon and so it seems like we haven’t really done much sense but what has happened since is tremendous advances in technology that are inspiring a private commercial space industry and i honestly think that’s
The way forward and that’s we are we’re the cusp we’re very very close to a space boom hi i’m andy weir author of the martian which features a man who gets stranded on mars and also the author of artemis which features a smart-aleck ii criminal in the first city on the moon i think within 10 to 20 years the price of getting mass into low earth orbit is going to be
Driven down low enough that it’ll start to become possible for middle-class people to afford a space vacation and when that happens it’s going to become a trillion dollar industry so i think this is actually a pretty exciting time we’re at the very beginning it’s kind of like if you are looking at the airline manufacturers the very first ones to come up in the 1930s
And go like this is interesting i wonder where this is gonna go the moon has just been humanity’s companion since before we even understood that the world was round and it’s universal to all cultures there’s nobody who can’t see the moon so everybody’s got their own stories about it it has this mystical quality to it so we have deep down all the way in our lizard
Brains a strong desire to just fan out and colonize everything we can get our grubby paws on and we can’t help but look up at the moon and kind of want to colonize that as well so i think we just want to at some core level be there the thing about the moon is it’s almost like cheating the moon is so conveniently placed it is in orbit around earth so it’s always
This fairly constant distance from us we don’t have to do any special work with like super duper complicated launch window it’s like going to mars not only that but it’s basically made out of aluminum and oxygen which gives you the metal to build your moon city and then the air to fill it with in my book artemis there’s an established city a small city of about
2,000 people permanent that can service about 2,000 tourists every city on earth no matter which one it is at some point it exists because it had a financial reason to people don’t uproot their lives in their entire situation and move to a new place just for the heck of it they need a financial reason to do it they need to have a job and so in order for a city to
Exist there has to be a financial reason for it to exist and i said what is the financial reason mining well you could send robots to do your mining yeah research well that that’s not enough to support an entire city and so finally i decided tourism the answer is tourism and so the conceit in the book is that the price to low-earth orbit the price of commercial
Spacecraft has been driven down by competition far enough that middle-class people can’t afford to go into space i definitely believe the apollo 11 landing site will be a historical site of significance on the moon probably one of the most important ones until the moon starts developing its own historically important moments within the culture that develops there
To know the exact location where a human first touched an entire celestial object that’s pretty neat and i’ve got to assume that people will flock to go look at it hi sherwood if i was going to go to the moon as a tourist that would be the first place i’d want to go i don’t think that artemis is a depressing view of the future at all in fact it’s a firm economic
Foundation of a city with growth potential i think there’s nothing wrong with a resort town it’s all about economic systems most people think artemis is just like what did i base it on like oh you know stories of like you know cities out in space or great adventure novels or things like that really one of my greatest influences for artemis was the with the movie
Chinatown chinatown is really at its core an economic movie it’s the story of the ugly nasty machinations that have to happen in order for a city to grow if i wrote a book if there was no such thing as a moon and i wrote a book about some weird alien species and they all evolved on a planet that had a moon and the moon and their moon with its convenient as our
Moon if this was all fiction i wrote people would just say this is not entertaining this is just not realistic it is you know the world you’ve created for these people is making it too easy the the moon is just right there full of resources in a low gravity well which means it’s our gateway to the rest of the solar system and it’s just sitting there waiting for
Us to go tranquility we copy on the ground you gotta fight the guys about to turn blue
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'The Martian' author Andy Weir: 'Space vacations' to the moon will happen | FT By Financial Times
