Anyone who is old enough to remember the first ever moon landing will probably remember the feeling of expectation in the subsequent years as we all expected this to be the start of serious moves to colonise the moon or to at least get the chance to take our holidays there.
Yet, since then we have only heard occasional rumours of holidaymakers getting the chance to explore outer space in the future. Maybe you think that this is something which teams of boffins are working on and that one of these days cheap deals to the Sea of Tranquility will be on offer on Teletext.
Sadly this isn’t likely to be the case, and here are a few reasons why.
How Much Does It Cost?
Talking a family on a camping holiday seem expensive these days but do you have any idea how much a holiday to the moon would cost? So far not one single tourist has set foot on the moon, and the extremely limited number of people who have paid to go into space paid millions for the pleasure of trying to spot their mansions from outer space. It isn’t at all realistic to imagine that families will be able to visit the moon any time in the near future without spending an obscene amount of money on it.
What Are the Hotels Like?
What do you normally do on a family trip somewhere exotic? Go the beach, go to the shops and maybe dine out in a nice restaurant? Well, on the Moon there are no hotels, no roads, no restaurants and no crazy golf courses. There isn’t even any atmosphere for crying out loud. What on Earth would you do there once the novelty had worn off? The task of putting a reasonable tourism infrastructure on the Moon is something which would take billions of pounds and decades of work. If we have already seen that you would need to pay millions to get there then how happy would you be to find that you need to sleep in the spacecraft and that your only choice of food comes from those weird astronaut meals?
How Many People Have Done It?
Between the first moon landing in 1969 and the last one in 1972 only a dozen people have walked on the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite. That means that in the last 40 years not one single person has set foot on the Moon. It hardly bodes well for mass tourism in the near future, does it? Perhaps once regular Moon trips become a reality for astronauts again then we could consider the prospect of tourist trips as being a touch more likely but until then we will need to stick to holidays on our own planet it seems.
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