Private enterprise launching missions to Mars certainly has to do with mining the asteroid belt as much as anything else, with some dreaming of dollars in the trillions. Corporate entities that are essentially space states are concerning, and at Seize My Future, in a smart post, Devin Daniels wonders if they’ll be a reality within four decades. I think his timeline is a little aggressive, but the speculative narrative is worth reading. The opening:

2050

It is my personal belief that by 2030, we will see private space trips become far more common place, and we’ll see the advent of space hotels. By 2040, asteroid mining will have begun in earnest, an industry with the potential to generate multiple trillion dollar companies. Here’s the rub – that’s greater than the GDP of almost all countries on this planet. These corporations will need live people available both for customer service as well as maintenance on both the hotels and the mining units. Over time, these corporations will develop moderately sized settlements, so that those employed in space can have a little space to call their own.

Over time, this trend will rise. As this happens, it may only be a matter of time before a corporation decides that it would be better off as an entirely independent entity, not having to pay billions of taxes to Earth-based governments. They may make the case that their workers deserve to have local, direct representation, and that the countries on Earth do not provide adequate representation of space colonists. Whether or not this is a fair argument to make is irrelevant for the purpose of this post – it may be, it may not be. What we’re concerned with is – will it happen? To this end, I offer a short story about LunarTech, LLC – a hypothetical company that exists in the year 2050 doing lunar and asteroid mining, that got its start with lunar hotels.•