Space: Business on the Moon

While most Americans have their eyes fixed on the scheduled flight of Gemini 6 this week, many businessmen are looking even further—to the moon itself and the profits that will be made from lunar exploration. Although the first American will not set foot on the moon until the end of the decade at best, U.S. firms are already preparing the tools and machines that the lunanauts will need when they get there, from a simple hammer to chip rock samples to a trackless train to carry them over the vast, hostile lunar plain.

Cigar-Sized Jets. The first of seven unmanned Surveyors that Hughes Aircraft built at a cost of $420 million will make a soft landing on the moon early next year, bite into the moon’s crust to determine whether it is soft or hard, then use a long-legged TV camera to show observers on earth how deeply it has sunk. After Surveyor reports, Grumman Aircraft’s buglike Lunar Excursion Module, for which the company has received a $400 million contract, is expected to ferry two astronauts from the orbiting Apollo capsule for the U.S.’s first manned landing.

Once on the moon, the explorers will have little time for walking, and the biggest moon market now seems to be in “moonmobiles.” TRW Inc. has a $200,000 study contract for a tiny, cigar-sized jet that would take advantage of the moon’s light gravity (one-sixth that of the earth) to send an astronaut vaulting over crater and crag. Boeing and Bendix each have about $1,500,000 to design a lunar jeep, a snail-paced (5 m.p.h. to 10 m.p.h.), relatively light vehicle for short excursions during the early exploratory trips.

For longer journeys, Bendix and Boeing (with $800,000 in Government contracts) and Northrop (on its own) have designed balloon-wheeled mobile laboratories that can transport two men 250 miles. General Dynamics is working on a moon train made up of two-wheeled modules that could be linked together to form units of almost any length. General Motors and Bendix have been given about $400,000 each to build mockups of lunar vehicles. For fast hops—and possibly for emergency rescues—later explorers may have a “moon plane,” a two-man flying platform with a range of 30 miles; the Government has already given design contracts to Bell Aerosystems ($550,000) TRW Inc. ($106,000) and Westinghouse ($534,000).

The Starting Point. The moon business only begins with transportation. Martin Marietta has a $90,000 contract to create a drill to explore 10 ft. below the lunar surface, Westinghouse and Northrop more than $500,000 each for a 100-ft. drill. Ralph Stone & Co. of Los Angeles is spending $100,000 to develop vacuum containers to carry rock samples back to earth. Under an $88,000 contract, Martin is also making lunar tools, including a lightweight geological hammer, a hand lens and a scale to weigh rocks in the light gravity. Westinghouse is spending $4,800,000 to make tiny TV cameras to transmit live pictures of exploration back to earth. To shelter the moon explorers, Lockheed is planning surface living quarters in sausage-shaped tanks, and General Electric is working on an extensive underground base that would be blasted out of the moon’s depths.

When President Kennedy set the moon journey as a national goal in 1961, the cost was estimated at $20 billion; the estimate is now $40 billion. Though the contracts tend to be fairly small at this stage, businessmen expect the cost of exploration on the moon to rise to similarly huge proportions. “Getting there will only be the starting point,” says Martin Executive C. A. Harrison. And the first starting point at that. G.E. already has on its drawing boards an unmanned Mars explorer, and Boston’s GCA Corp., with $1,700,000 from the Government, is even now trying to determine what the weather will be like on Mars, Venus and Jupiter.