Making It Happen

We said that we need to return to the Moon for a combination of reasons, some with an exceedingly long timeframe, and others with a more immediate focus (such as those reasons related to using the Moon’s resources to replace scarce reserves of certain materials on Earth). Messrs Musk and Bezos are doing their bit on their respective schedules, to address these matters, while making a buck in the process. How urgent is this—is there some kind of window of opportunity in which we need to conduct this work, or do we have multiple decades to bring it to fruition? Opinions on this differ, and we shall merely present the data as the analysis unfolds. The two extreme viewpoints on this may be represented on the one hand, by those who say there is no urgency (and perhaps citing that no inbound asteroids capable of devastating the Earth have been detected that would arrive within the next hundred years, say). Or on the other hand, there are those who view the situation as a window of opportunity, in that we collectively still know how Apollo was done, and furthermore, we are fortunate to have available private capital engaged in space exploration due to the company founders’ interest and engagement following those first Moon landings in the 1969–1972 period. And, furthermore, they might importantly add that there may be disasters that befall the Earth more rapidly than we have assumed (e.g., as the result of global warming, or a global pandemic, or magnetic pole reversal, etc.). Since the timeframes for a future disaster scenario vary between on the one hand many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of years, and on the short-term assumption maybe only a decade or so, then it is best, they would argue, to err on the side of caution and operate as though the issue truly is urgent, and that we therefore need to rise to the opportunity offered by the window—especially since we have demonstrated 50 years ago that we do know how to do it. Make sense? Do you agree with that thought? Elon Musk, the President of SpaceX, does. In fact, it was his own formulation (Musk, 2015).