No one wants to go to the moon
Today, I had this hypothetical pop into my head while thinking about space tourism.
Imagine that you could go online right now, and buy a ticket to go to the moon. The ticket in its entirety costs $100USD, and there are no other significant costs associated with travelling to the rocket. If you want, you can imagine that the company will bring a rocket to your backyard. There are no environmental concerns or safety risks associated with the trip, and it will only take 8 hours of your time, so you can easily fit it into your schedule on a weekend.
The question is, how many times would you take the trip? Obviously, everyone I have ever known or will ever know would take the trip at least once. However, I can’t come up with any conceivable reason why a normal person would go more than ten times. Of course, there are a certain subset of space fanatics who might take the trip every single day that they could, becaues they love the idea of being off-world. Perhaps there would be researchers who would like to go to the moon to do research - even then, I’m not sure there is actually much to learn from being on the moon. The moon really is a boring place. It is an object in the sky that is essentially defined by having nothing going on with it. Once you’ve taken a sufficient number of rock samples, you’ve essentially learned everything there is to learn about what the moon is.
I think one response might be to wonder about moon mining operations, i.e. there are energy-rich ores on the moon, and it could be cost-efficient compared to the ticket cost to mine those ores and bring them back to Earth. Of course, all this does is highlight the absurdity of the hypothetical - a ticket to the moon will never cost as little as $100. We would be lucky to get it below a cost of $10,000. There would always be safety risks, and a reasonable space tourism industry would likely incur massive environmental damage. Furthermore, the fastest manned flight to the moon (Apollo 8) took 69 hours, so you would have to take an entire week off of work just to get there and back.
I know this likely won’t convince anyone who is already space-tourism-pilled. I guess I just want a blog article to point to in the rare case I get into this argument, so I have a pre-prepared argument.