MMM Classics Year 7: MMM #s 61-70

surface aboard one way space craft the majority of whose masswas manufactured there. There is precedent aplenty for suchdivided manufacturing. Martin Marietta, for example, maker ofthe Titan rocket, only makes the rocket casings, and then matesthem with engines and other components made by other firmslike Rocketdyne.And as for more sophisticated space hardware? Whycouldn’t lunar owned & operated salvage companies retrievederelict satellites and other largely intact space hardware forrebuilding in lunar shops, and eventual reflight and reassignment?.Why accept preconceived limits?by Peter KokhSo long as all the companies, buyers and sellers both,engaged in the development and recovery of space resourcesare Earth-owned, -operated, and -situated, the age of interplanetarytrade will remain in the future. Everything will operate inthe regime of “me see, me want, me take”.Balance sheets will be kept in terrestrial board rooms,of course, but they will compare the “cost of taking” with theprofits from sales. Upfront capital investment will be risked,but not without reasonable promise of rewarding return intimely fashion. But these “balances” will be internal in nature.All monies involved will stay on Earth.Once, however, there are settlers and settlements onthe Moon or elsewhere in space who can effectively demandtreatment as economic entities in their own right, and are ableto bargain for a say in the terms and conditions by which thenon-terrestrial resources they make available to satisfy Earthneeds are delivered - then the age of genuine space “trade” willhave begun. As more and more of the companies involved aresettler-owned and frontier-headquartered, the settlements’collective economic bargaining power will increase.As supply is no longer able to be taken for granted butbecomes instead something to be bargained for, the balance of“deal power” will shift out of terrestrial boardrooms and intospace. Supply will cease to consist solely of found resources.Instead Earth companies will have to pay for the “value added”in settler mining and processing and shipping.When we first move past the see-want-take regimeinto the realm of export-import equation economics, barterarrangements will be the principal way of doing business. Thatis, we will be in an era in which Earth’s off planet tradingpartners have yet to establish “hard currencies”. Earth marketsget so much delivered energy (and/or helium-3 shipments) in anegotiated exchange for so much hydrogen, so much micronutrientfertilizer, so much electronics equipment, so muchcopper, so many vehicle engines, etcetera.The next stage of transaction measuring will involvesome combination of import credits on Earth coupled withenergy and resource futures on the Frontier. Deals will be madefor solar energy futures, helium-3 futures, lunox futures,building materials futures, etc.On the settlement side, the first milestone will be tobalance imports with exports, or alternatively to restrictimports to what can be purchased with exports. The long rangegoal will be to achieve a comfortable surplus margin in thattrade - with favorable long term prospects. Only then will thesettlements achieve genuine, and stable, economic autonomy,something they can bank on, and with which they can confidentlyplan their future growth-enabling purchases.On Earth barter still lives, especially between “hard”convertible currency nations on the one hand and “soft”, inconvertiblecurrency nations on the other. At first, trade betweenEarth and space frontier “nations” will probably follow thispattern. It will be very difficult base transaction “prices” onanything other than mutual supply and demand deals.On the frontier, currencies will be established tohandle transactions between settlers etc. But there, at least,there will be some shared commensurability of personalincome and the cost of locally supplied goods. The price of aloaf of bread, of a pound of meat, of a month’s rent or mortgagepayment will bear some sane relationship to weekly ormonthly income. But it will be hard to equate either frontierwages or prices to those on Earth in any direct sense.It may cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars anhour for an Earth firm to keep a lunar worker on the job. But aswe move from an Earth-based space frontier economy to theera of domestic space frontier economies trading with Earth,the situation changes utterly. A very, very pale example isoffered by the comparison of household economies in Alaskawith those in the continental U.S. In Alaska, the “dollar cost”of living is significantly higher. But so are the wages. Theresult is that the “standard” of living, how much consumercomfort a family can afford, is much more closely comparable.To be honest, comparing wages or prices on Earth with thoseon the Moon will be like comparing apples and oranges.Meanwhile, as space resources and terrestrial marketsfor them codevelop and evolve, the relative value of specificfrontier import items to that of specific export commodities issure to fluctuate considerably. Under those circumstances,using the dollar as the medium of exchange within spacefrontier domestic economies would then introduce wild anduncontrollable variability.The answer is a separate lunar or frontier currency.But until such a currency has achieved some basis of convertibilitywith terrestrial hard currencies, it will function more likea military “script”. That is a local currency may be minted andprinted to serve as the medium of exchange between settlers,but not serve as a medium of exchange for Earth-Moon trade.Such a currency could be named “the (lunar) dollar”,of course. But the settlers might just as easily christen it the“tanstaafl” after Robert A. Heinlein’s acronym for “there ain’tno such thing as a free lunch” in his novel “The Moon is aHarsh Mistress”. After all, “paying their own way” withexports will of necessity become a national frontier preoccupation,pursued with considerable dedication and persistence.The alternative is ultimate certain failure of the settlement.For Earth-Moon trade, lunar companies may choose tosell to Earth concerns only for payment in dollars or other hardterrestrial currencies. Additional dollars etc. will be taken inMoon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 7 - Republished January 2006 - Page 58