Colonization of the Moon
While a range of proposals for missions of lunar colonization, exploitation or permanent exploration have been raised, current projects for establishing permanent crewed presence on the Moon are not for colonizing the Moon, but rather focus on building moonbases for exploration and to a lesser extent for exploitation of lunar resources.
Currently the U.S.-led international Artemis program seeks to establish with private contractors a state run orbital lunar way-station in the late 2020s, and China proposed with Russia the so-called International Lunar Research Station to be established in the 2030s and aim for an Earth-Moon Space Economic Zone to develop by 2050.
This move to exploitation has been criticized as colonialist and contrasted by proposals for conservation (e.g. by the organization For All Moonkind),[16] collaborative stewardship (e.g. by the organization Open Lunar Foundation, chaired by Chris Hadfield)[17] and the Declaration of the Rights of the Moon,[18] drawing on the concept of the Rights of Nature for a legal personality of non-human entities in space.
[23] It restricts the use of the Moon to peaceful purposes, explicitly banning military installations and weapons of mass destruction.
that "the United States does not view outer space as a 'global commons'" and calls the Moon Agreement "a failed attempt at constraining free enterprise.
It is possible that large amounts of cargo would need to be launched into space for interplanetary exploration in the 21st century, and the lower cost of providing goods from the Moon might be attractive.
[42] In the long term, the Moon will likely play an important role in supplying space-based construction facilities with raw materials.
On Earth, gas bubbles may rise or fall due to their relative density to air, but in a zero gravity environment this does not happen.
One suggested trade commodity is helium-3 (3He) which is carried by the solar wind and accumulated on the Moon's surface over billions of years, but occurs only rarely on Earth.
"The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places; not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth."
[51] Gerard K. O'Neill, noting the problem of high launch costs in the early 1970s, proposed building Solar Power Satellites in orbit with materials from the Moon.
On April 30, 1979, the Final Report "Lunar Resources Utilization for Space Construction" by General Dynamics Convair Division under NASA contract, NAS9-15560 concluded that the use of lunar resources would be cheaper than terrestrial materials for a system comprising as few as thirty Solar Power Satellites of 10 GW capacity each.
[54] This 1980s SPS concept relied less on human presence in space and more on partially self-replicating systems on the lunar surface under telepresence control of workers stationed on Earth.
