Science Demand: What Scientists Want from the Moon
What do scientists want to do on the Moon, and how much will science budgets pay for lunar access?
Chapter summary
The Moon holds a record of the early solar system that Earth has erased, ice that tells the history of water in the inner solar system, and a far side shielded from Earth's radio noise that is ideal for low-frequency astronomy.
Key takeaways
- 1
Science is the largest non-crew customer for lunar landers: most CLPS payloads are science instruments.
- 2
Setcoin estimates that science budgets worldwide spend about $0.5–1 billion a year on lunar instruments and robotic missions, excluding the landers themselves.
- 3
It is a stable but limited market, paid for by agencies and universities, that grows only as access gets cheaper.
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