Google Promotes Moon Tourism and Jobs

The Restaurant at the End of the Moon

Since 2011 and the last American Space Shuttle voyage, various businesses have promoted a future of space tourism, complete with package tours and outer space hotels.

Before 2011 and back in the 1970s, CEO Dan Lasater of Ponderosa Steakhouses out of Kokomo, Indiana and Troy, Ohio secured a contract for the first restaurant on a space station.

Unfortunately, space restaurant contract expired before a space station became operational; and even then, there was no room for a restaurant. Even 40 years later, we still have no restaurant in space.

Leading up to the opening of the first space hotel or restaurant will be emerging new businesses and thousands of new jobs. This is the result of NASA's efforts at privatization in its Commercial Crew company partnerships. Health and Aerospace Industries are growing through at least 2050, because of the need for hundreds of such professionals for space exploration needs.

During the first week of November 2011, USA Today reported that NASA had actively began to plan for new business models for Moon Tourism.

NASA had been planning this for quite a long time, to ensure space programs continued after the end of the shuttle program. Privatized space flight is as alive as it is purported to be in the media.

An archaeologist called Beth O'Leary at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces NM wants to make lunar landing sites into US National Parks or US National Preserves. As with our current US National Parks, these new facilities would protect the environmental and history while drawing tourists and their money.

For the USA, the O'Leary proposal includes 6 separate landing sites dated 1969 to 1972, where artifacts have been left by US astronauts. Some of these artifacts are, in fact, debris and waste that might better be destroyed. Do we wish to spend large amounts of money to travel to the moon to look at human waste containers? - Likely not, but researchers might be interested in decay rates and similar.

Looting of the landing sites is a voiced archeological concern and to prevent this, NASA drafted a set of guidelines for protecting the lunar landing sites of USA.

The reason for the guidelines is that NASA, in 2010, was being asked questions about the moon by business/scientific teams in the emerging industry of privatized space travel.

According to NASA guidelines, spacecraft may not fly over the US landing sites and visitors on the lunar surface must stay outside a boundary zone around each one.

Researchers, rovers, robots, and tourists will not be able to get close to, or step into, Neil Armstrong's first lunar step.

Given the moon dust present, visitors so stepping would obliterate the historic footprint the first day. All of the Apollo sites are Cold War Space Race history timeline sites and will likely receive a special designation and name under the US Parks Service and National historic Landmarks program.

LunarX winners were ready to land on the moon in 2013, two years early.Funding was the only delay in flying.

A total of 26 teams from around the world at the end of 2011 worked on the Google Lunar X prize of $30,000,000. The competition created a mandatory lunar rover and a trip in it to cover 1/3 mile across the lunar surface.

Teams in Lunar-X represent coalitions of nations as well as single countries - Russia, USA (several teams), Malaysia, Japan, Israel, Chile, Germany, Hungary and others. Only one team, that of Italy, is led by a woman. The closet team to me is located at Penn State and we can expect many of their demonstrations and presentations to enjoy before 2015. Humans are going back to the moon.

At age 19, the Kokomo McDonald's company leaders felt that crew member Dan Lasater was too young to own a franchise. Dan left the Golden Arches and built four Scottie's Hamburger restaurants surrounding his former McDonald's, which went out of business.

Lasater switched the pricing scheme in his stores, making French fries more expensive than burgers. Since all the high school kids came in for fries every day, they added the cheap burgers, increasing sales.

Fries were 15 cents at the time and burgers were a dime. At the McDonald's, the fries were cheaper and that's all the youth bought.

Lasater founded Ponderosa Steakhouses with headquarters on the site of the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio. On a visit, I saw a gold plated telephone by the toilet in the bathroom of Lasater's office. Just outside the bathroom door was a large wet bar.

Dan sold the company for large profits and he began raising race horses profitably in Florida.

By the 1980s, Lasater was involved with cocaine and future US President Bill Clinton later pardoned him from drug charges. The latest word on the street is that he raises horses in both Kentucky and Florida at this time. He may be thinking of horses on the moon.