The first real moon vacations — eg. someone traveling to the moon purely on an non-governmental space ship for their own private purposes (interest, publicity stunt, promote their business, etc.) — won’t happen for at least a decade. But just because they aren’t going to happen in the short term, doesn’t mean that things won’t move incredibly fast when they do start moving.

Today, the space travel industry is truly nascent. There are many hurdles to overcome, both technological and societal, before we see moon travel and moon vacations. But don’t make the mistake of assuming that the pace of change won’t rapidly increase – it likely will.

We’ll likely see things move incredibly fast after we have relatively easy access (eg. under $25,000 for a visit, in 2022 USD) to low Earth orbit space tourism. By the time we have well-off people around the world taking low Earth orbit space trips, you can bet that there will be an incredible amount of energy and capital invested in taking space tourism to the next level – it’ll be only a few years until we see the first moon tourism (obviously at very high prices at first).

Investors and enthusiasts should all note what’s potentially to come. Investors are starting to look to the sky with all its possibilities now, just as investors of centuries past looked at the vast open sea and wondered at the riches that could be gained. There are risk, and plenty of them, but there are an incredible amount of opportunities. Space tourism and moon travel/vacations are just scratching the surface – the real wealth to be made in space will be made over the coming centuries (not decades), and will involve far more than tourism for well-off Earth humans. The new era of space could potentially bring centuries of incredible wealth creation as new spaces and opportunities are opened up, in orbit, on the moon, and on Mars.