It’s time to monetise the moon! Definitely! Maybe?
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Aim for the moon
It’s been a long time since humans walked on the Moon: 54 years in fact. Since then, many robots have visited our satellite, some of them even managing to land instead of sinking into the lunar surface like a ball hitting a pile of talcum powder. But no one.
NASA’s Project Artemis plans to send humans to land on the Moon in early 2028, two years from now. If this mission is followed by others, perhaps the permanent population of the moon will go from zero.
Feedback was therefore surprised to learn that the accounting firm PwC had published its assessment of the lunar market in January. “The Moon,” he wisely tells us, “is quickly becoming a potential focal point for future global economic activity in space.”
Finally, someone says it: every time Feedback looks at our planet’s natural satellite, we speculate on how to monetize it. PwC says people now have “ambitions focused on a sustainable human and commercial presence” and has tried to determine how big this new market might be.
“The study takes a scenario-based approach, forecasting market opportunities for activities on the surface of the Moon from 2026 to 2050,” we are told. “The focus is on five fundamental pillars: mobility, communication, housing, energy and water. Each area is analyzed in terms of investment needs, technological inflection points and potential revenue sources.”
It looks like lunar entrepreneurs can expect to make quite a bit of money. “The expected total cumulative revenue from activities on the surface of the Moon between 2026 and 2050 is expected to be in the order of $93.9. [billion] at $127.3 [billion]”, concludes PwC. This is more than the GDP of most countries.
It all depends, it seems, on one main factor. “The revenue prospects of the lunar economy depend above all on the intensity of exploration missions, with or without crew,” PwC informs us. When it’s true, it’s true.
Still, the numbers seem a bit optimistic given that Artemis missions to the lunar surface have yet to launch. Then we noticed that this was the second edition of PwC’s Moon Market Assessment, and we wondered what the first edition said. It was released in 2021 and predicted revenues of “$170 billion cumulatively through 2040” – meaning that five years ago PwC was expecting a lot more moonshine money, ten years earlier.
It’s unclear from the comments exactly what has changed over the past five years that has dampened the prospects for the lunar economy, but we are disappointed. We hoped to pay off our mortgage by investing in futures contracts for beef grown on the moon.
Stranger than fiction
In February, the newspaper Pediatrics and child health released two fixes. This is not unusual: journals constantly correct errors in scientific articles.
Except these weren’t ordinary corrections. One of them listed 15 articles that he was correcting; the other listed 123. The headlines explained that the goal was to “add a disclaimer.”
If readers scroll, as Feedback did, through the dizzying list of articles that required these new disclaimers, they will find the following text: “Each clinical vignette presented in the CPSP Highlights section of the journal describes a fictional case, created as an educational tool and linked to a Canadian Pediatric Surveillance Program (CPSP) study or investigation.
This is worded in such an innocuous way that its meaning might not be immediately clear. However, the friendly journalists at Retraction Watch put it much more explicitly: “A medical journal claims that the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction. »
It turns out that the journal has published a regular series of case studies since 2000 that appear to describe real patients. Some of these have been included in clinical advice; others encouraged doctors to launch research programs following these observations. Except the case studies were invented and the journal had never labeled them as such before.
The comments are going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps the warning that the case studies were fictitious should have been there from the start. But maybe we’re looking at things the wrong way. Science often struggles to get coverage in mainstream news, but if it were freed from the shackles of objective truth, it could really thrill readers. “Dark matter is actually the farts of space whales”: admit it, you’d click on that.
It’s time for a drink
Feedback has a sometimes recurring thread along the lines of “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?” » This persists because press officers continue to send us press releases that appear to convey objective scientific information, only to sneak in additional details that reveal their true motivations.
Another arrived in our overloaded inbox, announcing that “as World Sleep Day approaches (March 13, 2026), we share expert advice on a simple but often overlooked factor that could impact sleep quality: hydration.” He goes on to explain that “even mild dehydration can contribute to nighttime discomfort and next-day fatigue,” causing “common discomforts such as headaches, dry mouth, muscle cramps, and general restlessness.”
The press release was sent on behalf of a company that manufactures soluble electrolyte tablets.
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