New Jobs and Business Opportunities in Moon Tourism, 2012 - 2022

Since the late 2010s, various businesses have promoted a future of space tourism, complete with package tours and outer space hotels. Before that decade, founder Dan Lasater of Ponderosa Steakhouses out of Kokomo, Indiana and Troy, Ohio secured a contract in the early 1970s for the first restaurant on a space station (reference: my Ponderosa training classes). Unfortunately, time on the contract expired before a space station became operational; and even then, there was no room for a restaurant. In early 2012, we still have no such thing, but its time is coming soon.

Leading up to the opening of the first space hotel or space restaurant will be emerging new businesses and a lineup of 1000s of new jobs. Several hundred jobs opened in the last half of 2011. Since healthcare professionals are needed in designing all of this space adventure, Health and Aerospace Industries are growing from 2011 to at least 2050.

During the first week of November 2011, USA Today reported that NASA had actively began to plan for new business models in the emergence of Moon Tourism. This had begun, however before the last US Space Shuttle Flight occurred in July 2011. NASA has been planning this for quite a long time, in preparation for the end of the shuttle program and arranging job fairs for laid off workers in that defunct program. Privatized Space Flight is as alive as it is purported to be and several contracts for space vehicles for the United States are under way.

An archaeologist called Beth O'Leary at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces NM wants to make lunar landing sites into US National Parks or US National Preserves. As with our current US National Parks, these new facilities would protect the environmental and history while drawing tourists and their money.

For the USA, the O'Leary proposal includes 6 separate landing sites dated 1969 to 1972, where artifacts have been left by US astronauts. Some of these artifacts are, in fact, debris and waste that might better be destroyed. Do we wish to spend large amounts of money to travel to the moon to look at human waste containers? - Likely not, but researchers might be interested in decay rates and similar.

Looting of the landing sites is a voiced archeological concern and to prevent this, NASA drafted a set of guidelines for protecting the lunar landing sites of USA.

The reason for the guidelines is that NASA, in 2010, was being asked questions about the moon by business/scientific teams in the emerging industry of privatized space travel. According to NASA guidelines, space craft may not fly over the US landing sites and visitors on the lunar surface must stay outside a boundary zone around each one. Researchers, rovers, robots and tourists will not be able to get close to, or step into, Neil Armstrong's first lunar step. Given the moon dust present, visitors so stepping would obliterate the historic footprint the first day. All of the Apollo sites are Cold War Space Race history timeline sites and will likely receive a special designation and name under the US Parks Service and National historic Landmarks program..

Incidentally, for UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists and dabblers, the no-tourist boundaries would also keep visitors away from the structure that Buzz Aldrin saw on the moon during the Apollo 1969 mission and was instructed by radio from Houston to leave alone.

This is exciting! Many of us will live to see us back on the moon! Hopefully, Neil Armstrong is happy about this, even though it does not necessarily include NASA astronauts. Nichelle Nichols (Uhuru of Star Trek®), I hope, is also pleased, since she worked in recruiting for the NASA programs.NASA is still involved, if only a bit less directly.

A total of 26 teams from around the world at the end of 2011 are working on the Google Lunar X prize of $30,000,000. The competition includes a mandatory lunar rover and a trip in it of 1/3 mile across the lunar surface. It needs to stay away from the US lunar landing sites in order to preserve their integrity. This is the reason that NASA was required to write guidelines for preserving these sites -- Someone, or all 26, will be up there in 2015, tracking around in rovers. I want Neil and Nichelle and Homer Hickam (October Sky), all in their 80s, to live to see this.

Teams in Lunar-X represent coalitions of nations as well as single countries - Russia, USA (several teams), Malaysia, Japan, Israel, Chile, Germany, Hungary and others. Only one team, that of Italy, is led by a woman. The closet team to me is located at Penn State and we can expect many of their demonstrations and presentations to enjoy before 2015. Humans are going back to the moon.

Many of the teams can be followed on Twitter, Facebook, or both. See teams, their suit patches, blogs, and links at: Lunar X Prize Teams.

Dan Lasater succeeded early in life - perhaps too early.

At age 19, the Kokomo McDonald's entity leaders felt that Dan was too young to own a franchise, even he had in-store experience with them. So, Dan built four Scottie's burger places to surround his former McDonald's employer and closed it down.

Dan switched prices in his own four stores, making fries more expensive than burgers, since all the high school kids came in for fries every day. The kids all bought fries and then decided to buy the cheaper Scottie's hamburgers as well and profits boomed.

Lasater went on to begin Ponderosa Steakhouses with partners and sold it for large profits. Following that, he went into raising race horses and made more profits.

By the 1980s, Lasater was involved with cocaine and future President Bill Clinton, who later pardoned him from drug charges. The latest word on the street is that he raises horses in both Kentucky and Florida.

Given earlier encouragement as a teen and a mindset to avoid drugs, Dan Lasater may have become a great consultant on the Lunar-X Prize mission, and could possibly have realized his dream for the restaurant in space.