Some ways to make money on the moon. 1. Oxigen factories for Mars shuttles. Although Musk's vision for Mars makes sense as it is, it becomes much more economic

Some ways to make money on the moon. 1. Oxigen factories for Mars shuttles. Although Musk's vision for Mars makes sense as it is, it becomes much more economical if you add oxygen production on the Moon. You can manufacture the oxygen locally on Mars (via the Sebatier process), but you need some factories to do that. It's going to be much cheaper to build much larger factories on the Moon, and ship the oxygen on Low Mars Orbit. There are lots of numbers you can look at, but here's a quick comparison. The BFR second stage, planned to weigh 2100T, will be able to deliver about 170T of payload to the surface of Mars and about 980T to the surface of the Moon (almost 6 times as much). It's going to take much fewer trips to build a factory on the Moon, plus, if anything breaks, you can ship a replacement in days, rather than months or years. 2. Build solar panels on the Moon and ship them to Mars. In a few decades it will be cost competitive with building and shipping from Earth. Compared to building locally on Mars, it will probably always be cheaper. 3. Build nuclear rockets (not missiles) [1]. It's unlikely we will have the appetite to launch such rockets from the Earth in the next 50 years or so, due to the risk of breakup during launch. On the Moon however, everything above ground is continuously exposed to massive radiation (mainly from the Sun), so a nuclear fallout will not change things too much. If we ever want to do true deep space exploration, we need to move beyond chemical rockets. The Moon can help us get there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket