"[T]he dawning of space tourism seems ignoble. NASA announced in June that it would rent out the International Space Station to private parties..."

"... for $35,000 a night per person, a pittance considering that any customer will have paid someone else tens of millions of dollars for the trip by rocket. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, has booked a putative voyage around the moon with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. 'I will be heading to the moon,' he claims, 'just a little earlier than everyone else.' He’s calling it an art project. You might call it thrill-seeking for plutocrats. Looked at coolly, the moon doesn’t seem promising as a tourist destination. If it were on earth, no one would want to go there. I say leave it alone for a while. When we looked close up, we found barren sand, inanimate rock of indeterminate color, and no urgent reason to stay. The moon abides. It rules the firmament. Waning crescent, waxing gibbous, it raises the oceans and tugs at our thoughts. 'It still holds the key to madness,' E.B. White wrote fifty years ago, 'still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky.'"

So ends "Moon Fever" by James Gleick (in The NY Review of Books).