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Financial research is an on-going part of the Artemis Project. Here we present a summary of the estimates we have made so far, based on an integrated program of marketing the first manned flight to the moon.
We've been reluctant to distribute the numbers without the accompanying Basis of Estimate. That leaves the field open for a few nay-saying iconoclasts to waste an enormous amount of our time by spamming the net with misinterpretations of the data. That's one of the unfortunate side effects of the Internet which we'll just have to deal with as it arises. We're learning to be more hard-nosed in dealing with recreational nay-sayers: if they can't provide hard, documented numbers along with their arguments, it doesn't make sense to take their arguments into account. We just don't have time to deal with fictional financial data.
For example, take the notion of earning $800 million from a single movie. That came from the table published in the article in the January 1995 iss of Analog. As you'll see in the table below, we've actually increased the estimate of total net revenues from motion pictures to $1.2 billion. This is the net from a series of movies released over a period of 10 years, each movie with half the attendance of the previous one. The number is larger than before because in the past two years we've learned a lot more about movies, where the money comes from and where it goes, and who gets how much of the profit.
Some of the numbers (especially publications, merchandising, simulations, and motion pictures) are fairly solid, based on research into their respective industries. But others (educational and scientific data in particular) are just educated guesses. These two carry little of the expected revenues, however.
We might have significantly underestimated the potential revenues available from some areas such as product endorsements. That's where we'd list businesses which elect to sponsor the project in return for promotional consideration, without actually producing a product directly related to the project. Nothing in this table reflects that sort of sponsorship because we don't have any basis for estimating it.
Also, merchandising of lunar samples returned from the moon will probably be a large source of income. We didn't include selling moon rocks in this table, however, because we have no way to determine their market value. In past few years, a few lunar samples have exchanged hands for enormous prices, but we can expect that once a steady supply is available, the price will drop.
Revenues, in millions of 1995 US$
TV cvrg 198.0 4.5%
Motion Pictures 1,200.0 27.2%
Videotapes 1,000.0 22.6%
Toys 400.0 9.1%
Educational Data 40.0 0.9%
Scientific Data 200.0 4.5%
Magazines 126.0 2.8%
Books 5.0 0.1%
Other Pubs 20.0 0.5%
Video Games 375.0 8.5%
Clothing 30.0 0.7%
Gen Merch 200.0 4.5%
Games 4.4 0.1%
VR Experience 25.0 0.6%
Models 12.0 0.3%
Retail Franchise 50.0 1.1%
Retail Sales 400.0 9.1%
Product Endorsements 125.0 2.8%
Software 5.0 0.1%
Total 4,415.4 100.0%
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