Hotels on the lunar surface and travel to the moon have taken a meteor hit this week.
Efforts hit a bit of a clanger, if you excuse this British slang.
Entrepreneur Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Holdings went into administration, which sadly for him and his employees means that firm’s rocket craft will never make its virgin landing.
The race to the moon becoming a new hotel market has taken a step back, and the celebratory Stilton and Cheddar fondue party must wait.
I mention cheese, as everyone of my generation knows the moon is made of cheese as we grew up watching “The Clangers,” which were animated, woolen mice that lived high above.
The Clangers communicated in whistles and ate only green soup, served by the Soup Dragon, as a main dish followed by blue string pudding as a dessert.
That animated TV series was made in response to us humans actually having reached the moon in 1969.
A failed launch earlier this year by Branson’s company must have been extremely expensive, and deep pockets are needed for such a grandiose experiment.
The carbon footprint probably is unjustifiable, although to offset it might require hundreds of thousands of more trees on Earth, which would be a very good thing.
I applaud Branson’s will to dream, and there are others who share his vision and might have better luck. Very likely, he will try again.
There is no reason a successful tourism business cannot be created on the moon, although saying that my memory of attempts to create something similar on Earth have not met with much success either.
More than 20 years ago, I remember an Irish-Canadian entrepreneur, Michael Henderson, touting a moon-themed resort, complete with massive, spherical moon, in Las Vegas.
It never lifted off the ground, but I see he is back touting not one moon-themed resort — likely to be in Las Vegas, although a rendering clearly shows Dubai — but four.
There remains plenty of scope for eye-widening hotel developments here on Earth, and they do not need to have zero-gravity chambers, alien art and photos of Neil Armstrong.
Each resort, apparently, will have a room count of approximately 4,000 rooms and a price tag of approximately $5 billion, although neither of these massive numbers is otherworldly for Nevada’s premier playground.
Some of me complains at such endeavors when the Earth has so many wonders of its own, but my bah-humbug attitude also wonders why Abu Dhabi needs an adjunct facility of Paris’ The Louvre art gallery or a Harry Potter World.
Yes, I think being gravity-less for 15 minutes would appeal to me as an ardent birder, but after that I think I would go back to the world we have here on Earth and continue to seek out its own wonders.
After all, no one can possibly see it all in one lifetime.
Perhaps we can try with a visit to Branson’s property Virgin Hotels New York City, which opened April 5 right on Broadway in Manhattan with 463 rooms.
It has a Sky Lounge on its 38th floor, which I am hoping has a telescope at all times facing our nearest orbiting planetary object.
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