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Our working schedule shows that if everything went right (it won't), we could get that first crew up there about 8 years after the start of the formal Preliminary Design. Considering the realities of getting capital, building a business that can handle the amount of business we're talking about, it'll probably be somewhere around the year 2007 before the first moon crew gets their boots dusty.
At that point we'll know a lot about the landing site, and we'll have an exploration base to work from. We can start producing some oxygen to leverage future flights, so we're on our way.
If development of people-carrying rockets and freight-carrying rockets keeps pace with the lunar base development, it'll take another five years of preparation before we're running tours. We have in mind an operation similar to the tourist flights from Christchurch, New Zealand to Antarctica. That brings us up to the year 2012.
With an efficient transportation system in place, we can start talking seriously about building the Luna City Hotel. So if the demand is there, by the year 2017 we could a comfortable environment for tourism and lots of entertaining things to do on the moon.
The economic model in mind is a bit like Japan or Hawaii -- an island with heavy tourist trade, but with a foundation of local industry and lots of imports and exports. If the transportation system becomes very efficient, with costs similar to aircraft transportation on Earth, the lunar community will be able to branch out into industries that are not based on the moon's unique characteristics. That would certainly assure their future.
Usually folks think in terms of this happening a hundred years in the future, but consider where Japan is now compared to 1965, just 30 years ago. If back then you were to suggest that Japan would become a world leader in manufacturing automobiles, people would laugh; obviously transporation costs will prevent them from ever exporting anything heavier than a transistor radio.
The key to bringing same kind of economic phenomenon to the moon is creating a program where people are able to earn a living doing it. And that, of course, is exactly what we are doing with the Artemis Project.
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