When you talk to people about the moon, some people get excited about creating a human settlement, others see a perfect place for lunar mining, and still others see the perfect place to put a radio telescope on the moon's far side, shielded from all the electromagnetic 'noise' that earthlings are pumping out every day.

It doesn't take long to realize that there will need to be some way to play air traffic control for all of these different groups and their diverse needs.

For example, the astronomers see the back side of the moon as a precious haven of electromagnetic quiet. Now, if a settlement were to grow on the near side of the moon and they wanted to have an orbiting communication system to allow them to talk to other explorers, robots, and settlements- they might put up a series of communications satellites. If we are not careful or if no one is keeping track of what all the different lunar "user groups" are up to we could have situations that just dont work.

Consider, three zippy little communications satellites put up around the moon could easily interfere with the astronomy needs of a user group that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to get their lunar telescope built. That is just one example of how groups could impinge on each other.

Luckily there could be a technological solution. If lunar communications systems switched to optical communications for example, sending 1's and 0's as individual photons, maybe that could make a huge difference. If the two user groups are working together, I am sure we can work it out.

In the end we really need to think about the whole moon and coming up with a model that allows people to fulfill on what they are there to accomplish. I think that having this process publically will give us an opportunity to raise the profile of private spaceflight and demonstrate that we have learned something from living on Earth.