Flights Direct

Flights to the moon may be available privately to everyone ‘by the end of the 2020s’, a NASA official was heard saying in London yesterday.

Peter Worden, the director of the NASA Ames Research Station in California was yesterday speaking to a group of physics students and faculty at the University of Western Ontario, commented that NASA is reaching its targets to return people to the moon by 2020, which would be the first people up there since 1972.

However, it might not be NASA who are the first ones who reach the moon on a visit. There are around 20 wealthy individuals, as well as companies, from all over the worlds who are expressing an interest in taking their own space flights. “I think (private interests) are going to beat us to the lunar surface,” Worden commented.

These private fliers would not just be astronomy buffs, “it’s NASA’s unstated policy that the moon is available for economic activity,” Worden stated, when answering a question about the legal frontier of space.

It looks quite likely that there will be room for regular people, and not just scientists and astronauts, for trips to the moon. As the ideas of these commercial flights move forward, Worden predicted. “We think we’re at the verge of really interesting private efforts to move forward.”