‘Fly Me To The Moon’ Was Just a Song Made Popular by Frank Sinatra Back in the Sixties; He Didn’t Mean it Literally

WASHINGTON, DC, Feb 21 – Some might say that the thinkers at the Adam Smith Institute, one of the world’s leading think-tanks, were playing a joke on us when they published an analysis entitled “Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon.”  Others might say they are suffering the results of the covid pandemic self-isolation protocols.

The author of the white paper, consultant Rebecca Lowe, describes it as a framework “to enable individuals to attain morally-justified property rights in space, with a particular focus on plots of moon land.”  According to the Futurism website, Ms. Lowe’s analysis “argues that the Moon should be split up among the nations of Earth, which would then rent or sell them to boost the economy.”

The paper was published on the Institute’s website a few weeks ago and quickly received feedback from readers, including one harsh reader, who wrote: “Rather than the hard work of figuring out how to implement real, effective change in our current times against titanic problems, you get to play the game of pre-pubescent kids watching Star Wars for the first time and write vague, fantastical imaginings dressed in the clothes of solutions.”

At first blush you might argue that the moon is uninhabitable; it has no atmosphere.  You’d be wrong, however.  According to NASA the moon does have an atmosphere but perhaps not enough of an atmosphere to suit the needs of oxygen-dependent humans.  As for water, the other element needed to sustain life, it is not known if the amount of water that might be available on the moon is enough for any significant colonization.

The question is, are there any earthlings who might want to settle down on the moon.  Surely there are some out there who might consider giving it a try for whatever perverse, unimaginable reason.  In fact, the realtors at The International Lunar Lands Registry [ILLR boast that “As of July 2019, ILLR has legally registered more than 326,000 claims to properties on Luna, encompassing more than 1.25-million acres of the Moon’s surface, on behalf of corporate and individual landowners in nearly every country on Earth – and, so far, on every continent except Antarctica.”

One can only wonder how ILLR is able to sell lunar parcels considering the dictates of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which declares “Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”  But some say that the international accord refers only to “appropriation” by a nation and, as an analysis by the folks at Phys.Org notes, “there is no legal consensus on whether or not the treaty’s prohibition [is] also valid as far as private appropriation is concerned.”

But now we come to the good part.  Let’s assume it is lawful for we, mere mortals, to own lunar homesteads.  The question now becomes: how much and how hard is it to build the home of your dreams on the moon?  Salman Haqqi, personal finance executive at the British financial services firm, Money, did the math.

Haqqi says that the first step in calculating the cost of your lunar home is the price of acreage.  Depending on where you want to build your new home, it will cost you between $19.00 and $129.00 per acre.  Cheap enough.  But construction costs are not so cheap.  The price you’ll have to pay for just transporting the construction crew and the equipment and materials they’ll need for the job will set you back nearly $8 million.

But that’s only for starters.  According to Haqqi: “building a house on the Moon isn’t as simple as building a house on Earth.  Due to the extreme weather conditions and the high likelihood of meteor showers, things like air seals, industrial-strength air-con and heaters, meteor proof windows, insulation and organic sources of energy are all pricey necessities. These will come to a combined cost of £29 million ($40 million) … Therefore, the overall cost to build the first fully functioning house on the moon would be £34,892,500.06” – a whopping $47,433,562.43.  The good news, he points out, is that once that first house is built, the cost of building more houses would be reduced to about £29,281,781.99 or 39,806,240.07 U.S. dollars.

Oh yeah, you also have to factor in the costs of some of the essentials you’ll need such as electricity, food, water and oxygen, bearing in mind that you will be some 238,900 miles away from earth and civilization.  So, before you decide to settle down on the moon, consider the relocation options you have right here on planet earth.