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Monday, Jul 6, 2009
Shady moon peddlers look like lunar Donald Trumps, now that civilian space travel appears feasible. But are moon plots legal?
By Elizabeth Svoboda
Illustration by Val Mina
Jan. 19, 2008 | Flash forward to 2009. Eight people, two pilots and six civilians who have anted up $200,000 for tickets, settle into La-Z-Boy-style seats aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo for a two-hour suborbital space flight. To be sure, SpaceShipTwo's planned jaunt to more than 68 miles above Earth's surface will be the space-tourist version of a kiddie roller-coaster ride; passengers will experience only a few minutes of free-floating weightlessness and won't be allowed to venture out on spacewalks. Still, Virgin's maiden voyage seems poised to usher in the private space-travel era that basement rocket-builders have anticipated for decades. Company reps hope suborbital transit will prove a potent gateway drug, enabling Virgin and competitors like SpaceDev to expand their service to the moon. Dutch architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut has already hatched plans for a four-star lunar hotel.
The prospect of large-scale commercial space travel is music to the ears of Dennis Hope, who has been anticipating this era for more than a quarter-century. The Nevada-based entrepreneur -- who styles himself as a latter-day Columbus with Murdochian marketing aplomb -- is the founder and self-proclaimed "Head Cheese" of Lunar Embassy, an online portal that parcels out moon land for less than it costs to stay overnight at a Motel 6. For $19.99, Hope's pie-in-the-sky sales pitch promises that you too can snap up your very own one-acre lunar plot. And with the Earthbound real-estate market cratering, who can resist the growth potential? A split-level overlooking the Sea of Tranquility, a condo at the foot of the Archimedes mountain range -- the possibilities are endless.
Until a couple of years ago, no one paid much attention to Hope and other space-plot peddlers like Lunar International and the Lunar Registry; they were widely regarded as a few planets short of a solar system. Besides, the idea of claiming land in outer space or exploiting its resources remained chiefly theoretical. These days, with Virgin et al. charging full speed ahead, private citizens could feasibly start taking regular jaunts to the moon by 2020 or so. But the real money is not in the pleasure rides. With crude oil nearing $100 a barrel, entrepreneurs focused on petroleum alternatives are looking at the green cheese in a whole new light -- and that has lunar real estate agents envisioning asteroid showers of money raining down on them.
Lunar soil is rife with platinum group metals, which are exceedingly rare on Earth and are key to helping hydrogen fuel cells operate efficiently. Then there's the real golden ticket: helium-3, deposited on the moon's surface by radioactive solar winds. When combined with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, helium-3 can initiate fusion reactions so potent that scientists estimate a single space-shuttle load of the stuff could power all the homes and businesses in the United States for a year.
"The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the Earth," former Indian President Abdul Kalam told attendees at 2004's International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon. Gerald Kulcinski, director of the University of Wisconsin's Fusion Technology Institute, thinks helium-3 could potentially power future long-distance space travel, though it could take decades before a commercial helium-3 reactor becomes available.
Since the moon's resources could fetch billions of dollars in the Earth marketplace, Hope says, it should be a no-brainer for shrewd real-estate buyers to set aside some petty cash and snag a piece of the action. Best of all, the entire scheme is perfectly aboveboard from a legal standpoint -- if you take Hope's word. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the most recent piece of widely ratified United Nations legislation on moon property ownership, states that territories beyond the Earth cannot be owned by national governments, but it does not specifically prevent private citizens from making land claims. The 1979 Moon Treaty attempted to close this loophole by forbidding ownership of any extraterrestrial property by any organization or person, but the treaty quickly died on the vine; only 13 U.N. member nations ever ratified it.
After the Moon Treaty tanked, Hope sent letters to the the U.N., the United States government and the Russian government, declaring his ownership of the moon. He has taken their lack of response as carte blanche to go ahead with his grandiose appropriation scheme. His plans include establishing the first helium-3 mining operations on the moon by 2011 (NASA, by contrast, won't mount its next manned lunar landing until 2019) and forming a "democratic republic sovereign nation," the Galactic Government, in which his property-owning customers will enjoy voting rights. If other nations infringe on the territory he has claimed, he will view their incursions as acts of war.
"The U.N. has had plenty of time to acknowledge our claims of ownership," Hope says. "Who are they to tell us we can't do this?" He cites first-claimant-takes-all precedents set during the homesteading era as justification for his planned land grab. "Look at the United States when it first became a country. Land acquisition was frequently done on a remote basis. We're just going by the precepts of our forefathers."
