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Private Firm Plots Robotic Lunar Exploration
DeviceGuru writes "Astrobotic Technology has unveiled plans for a series of robotic expeditions to the Moon. The lunar rovers will explore high-interest areas of the Moon's surface and beam the data back to the Earth. The plan is to accumulate an extensive library of lunar data and sell it to governments and private corporations (PDF), much as Navteq's data forms the backbone of most terrestrial GPS services. Astrobotic's first goal is to win Google's $30 million Lunar X Prize, with a May, 2010 trip to the Apollo 11 landing site at Mare Tranquillitatis."
What will happen in space is you'll get a few large companies that get people to sign contracts with them that cover their cost to orbit. The cost will be so high it will put people so far in debt that they have to sign away their freedom, and work for the company as property for several generations.
A few will be able to earn their freedom. Those that earn their freedom will settle in cities and become merchants and prosper. These merchants power will come to rival the corporations which by that time will have become inefficient and corrupt, but the corps. will control the the law and use it to support their power.
This control will ultimately be challenged by a revolutions lead by the middling merchant class and made up of the poor contract workers around the year 2775.
The revolution will be successful and force everyone to follow the same laws, and turn the governing of the land over to the law which will be written in a representitive collective fashion, removing the power of corrupt officials to rule by mandate. Then everything will be peachy utile the wealthy discover that they can just buy the representitives who write the laws and create a system that benefits themselves handsomely, they will even learn that all they need to do to silence any criticism of that system is accuse it's critics of being a straw man called co-prosperitalism.