Science first, but the biggest economic driver will be tourism and sports. Moonball will be the biggest sporting event broadcast on Earth. Jumping 20 feet for the dunk? Yes please.
But before team sports, dirtbiking will be a special once-in-a-lifetime moon tourist experience.
Going forward, there will be special culinary options due to the excessively large moonfruits that can be grown in low gravity.
The trip will only take a day of travel. Plenty of living room in those enormous natural moon caves (lava tubes). Let's have some fun up there.
> Science first, but the biggest economic driver will be tourism and sports.
Tourism for a couple of ultra-rich, yeah, but sports? Need massive structures for that one.
I rather believe that Moon commercial usage will be dominated by resource gathering: mining for rare materials deposited by aeons of asteroid hits, helium-3 (assuming the Moon Nazis from Iron Sky left us anything), or anything that can be chemically converted to rocket fuels in order to provide efficient fueling options for Mars and beyond missions.
"Despite early speculation which consisted largely of unique and fantastical possibilities... by affording unprecedented visibility due to it's mamouth size, proximity to dense population centers and rotational properties of the celestial body, Lamar advertising was able to secure exclusive rights to the entire lunar surface by 2036."
Advertising. It has a bunch of logos for the people who financed it. In a way, the US space program is an ad for the US military, but this is more overt.
Can someone clue me in on what types of commercial activity will happen first?