Better Financing for the LTS Earth-Moon Highway - February 7, 2005
Lunar settlements obviously won't happen without regular transportation from Earth being available. Materials and personnel will need to flow to the nascent outposts and back again reliably and without excessive expense. That much may seem obvious - but until now there have been no serious proposals to actually build an Earth-Moon transportation system.
Enter Lunar Transportation Systems (LTS), Inc., a company founded in 2004 by Walter Kistler and Bob Citron. Kistler and Citron plan to raise the money for and construct the first Earth-Moon transportation system during the next several years. For space development advocates, this is great news!
The idea is for the LTS space highway to plug in to the President's Space Vision and provide services to NASA as that agency shoots for the Moon. To get things rolling, LTS is working now to raise money from the private sector to develop the vehicles and space infrastructure they will need.
The LTS website doesn't provide any dollar figures for how much setting up this space highway will cost. Nor do they say that they believe NASA will underwrite much (or any) of the cost of designing, building, and testing their space line. Presumably they believe the fees they would charge NASA and any private companies also engaged in developing the Moon will offset their investment and generate a sufficient profit. The Earth-Moon space highway sure would be easier for LTS to finance if there were some tangible economic product they could cash in on instead of relying primarily on transporation fees.
In fact, the lunar land claims recognition legislation proposed at www.spacesettlement.org/law could be the key to making the development of an Earth-Moon space line profitable. Hopefully Kistler and Citron will find the private financing to build their space line - but for an idea this expensive and risky, venture capitalists and investors want to see as much return on their money as possible.
How much more convincing the LTS proposal would be if, in addition to talking about the fees they will one day charge NASA for transporting people and materials to the Moon, LTS explains they will also earn recognition from the U.S. government of ownership of thousands of square miles of Lunar territory? This Lunar land would be a multi-billion dollar capital asset which could immediately be sold to investors, speculators, and the general public to recoup the costs of developing and building the Earth-Moon space line.
To be fair, to fulfill the conditions of international law LTS would need to partner with other organizations whose goal is actually building a permanent Lunar facility. NASA's efforts toward building a base wouldn't count - the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans land ownership in space by governments. And there are a few other conditions that LTS would have to meet. It doesn't seem too far a reach, though, to think that once it becomes clear that an Earth-Moon transport system is going to happen - and that the reward will be billions in lunar land - that aerospace companies will jump at the opportunity to form a consortium with LTS.
For more information about the lunar land claims recognition concept, see the Space Settlement Initiative, including the Questions & Answers section on that website. A summary is also available on the Institute's LCR Abstract page.
