"Sell the right to leave your footprints in the moon," one said. "The contract says that they’ll be roped off for all eternity, like Neil Armstrong’s. Someone will bite."

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And I thought: barefoot.

Arthur Clarke has pointed out that a man dropped into vacuum won’t just explode. He’d have roughly two minutes, conscious, to get himself into air again. He’d blow his eardrums (they grow back) and the varicose veins might be spectacular, a badge of honor. If he forgot to exhale he’d burst his lungs.

But we’re playing tourist games; we don’t have to go that far.

One of you is going to be the first human being to walk barefoot on the moon. There’s no need to be stark naked. Take a pressure suit -- standard by the time we can make this offer -- remove the boots, apply tourniquet pressure around the ankles or calves. We’ll bring you out to some flat patch of deep dust, in a moon crawler (also standard by now). You’re in the airlock; there’s a countdown--

Now you do the three-yard run. Not too fast, bozo, because you’ve got to make that turn, and if you bound over the damn airlock you’ll have to come back!

Afterward we’ll set up the fence and signs, treat your feet for dehydration and frostbite, possible cuts and that mapwork of burst blood vessels you’ll be bragging about into the next century. We’ll take close-up pictures of the footprints to go with the video of your run, and drive you back to Moonbase. (We can’t use a flying vehicle! Rocket exhaust would erase the footprints.)

Danger? No worse than skydiving. Well, not much.

Expense? Today it’s impossible. Tomorrow. . . . My lovely wife Marilyn gets the Neimann-Marcus annual catalogue. It always offers a hugely expensive one-of-a-kind gift. What a lovely 50th anniversary present this would be! Bill Gates, I never know when you’re listening.

That’s for later this century. What about the near term?

Consider space as entertainment. We pay for the next generation of spacecraft via a subscription channel that watches every launch, that gets exclusive coverage from the probes and live coverage aboard the International Space Station.

It would be dishonest. Every taxpayer paid for the probes, the shuttles, the space station. We can’t cut them off from what they bought. It’s a bootstrap problem: private enterprise doesn’t have much to sell as entertainment until it can afford to launch something.

A currently popular scheme, variously expressed, would fit right in.

We drop a crawler (like Sojourner) on the moon. (Eventually we’d want Mars.) It’s relatively cheap, no bigger than a toy, although orbiting relays (needed around Mars) would bring up the price. It’s controlled from Earth by VR. Give the controls to the highest bidder. Or go for publicity and donations: let Jay Leno steer the thing on TV. Get advertising from Toys-R-Us or Sega.

If you can drop a thousand such mini-rovers across the moon, you’d go to a flat rate: anyone can steer a mini-rover over lunar terrain for fifty bucks a minute or something reasonable. Losing one costs extra.

Jerry Pournelle told me about a discussion of the mini-rover scheme. Question: where do you drop the first mini-rover? Tryouts on the moon, of course, even if your ultimate goal is Mars. Where would it get the most media attention?

Apollo 11's landing site was their first choice, Jerry said, but that’s dull turf. Tranquility Base was the guaranteed flattest possible place to land the first LEM, with no interesting-but-dangerous rocks, projections, anomalies . . . nothing.

Of course you could tour around Armstrong’s footprints . . . but even though he drives pretty good -- being a classic car buff -- Jay Leno might run over the footprints. Someone eventually would. Can’t have that.

I say: drop the toy car next to the first automobile on the moon.

1. It’s too big to hurt by accident.

2. $50-a-minute drivers could follow the tracks the moon buggy left. See everything the astronauts saw. Go on to terrain they missed.

3. We can "drive" the moon buggy itself this way. But we don’t need a humanoid robot (or another astronaut) for that. Just an advanced mini-rover to climb up and plug into the controls, carrying a program update and a camera to ride the dash.

4. All it takes is funding.