"Hole"y moley, surely! That city won't be getting my tourist dollars. I'm content to see the pictures of others. I've been trying to figure out if the bottom of the pit is really cold, as the -60C winter air sinks to the bottom and doesn't leave, or if it's warmed up from being that deep. I can see why there might be turbulence problems. I wonder if a sarlacc wants to move in.
I'll add some more history of space tourism. Quoting http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120712-where-is-hiltons-lunar-hotel : "Those plans began to take off in 1967. Barron, who was then president of Hilton, told the Wall Street Journal that he was planning to cut the ribbon at an opening ceremony for a Lunar Hilton hotel within his lifetime." - something Mad Men fans might have heard about. To be fair, it was mostly a PR stunt, but many people made 'reservations'. Such tourism stunts are likely even older, as one of my favorite books as a kid, Heinlein's 1958 book "Have Space Suit—Will Travel", referred to them as coming true.
I think it's important to point out that these illustrations were part of a longer history. Galileo first observed the craters on the Moon in the 1600s. By the end of the 1700s, Schröter measured lunar elevations and determined that "the amount of material around a crater ... is exactly equal to the amount that it would take to fill the crater up again" - https://www.univie.ac.at/geochemistry/koeberl/publikation_list/189-lunar-craters-history-EMP2001.pdf though he thought the rim was due to trees. (BTW, Wikipedia says Schröter was the first to call them craters.) That link includes a 1873 illustration of what the view of the Moon's surface, looking towards the Earth, might look like. It's very similar to Bittinger's 2nd image shown here. The lunar craters have rims, and a central peak. It even has a similar view of Earth, with South America prominent in both images.
Sweden and Norway are also take-off-shoes-in-the-house countries. Though the linked-to article does say "for the average household, shoe bacteria don't pose an immediate risk", so it's unlikely that that's the reason.
Minor complaint: the article mentions there are more germs than "even the surface of a toilet". Every (pop science) article I've seen on the topic says that the surface of a toilet is one of the most sanitary places in the house. So not a good comparison.
Death rates based on vehicle failure are only part of the overall risk. What's the effect of 3gs during launch or the 9gs for an abort (the Blonsky device hasn't been used, though the patent proposes that 8gs be the high end)? Rats born in space have an underdeveloped vestibular system. What of humans? Can an epidural be administered in microgravity? How are bodily fluids handled? Is the air composition appropriate for newborns? There is much to work out first. But yeah, figuring 70 years for the youngest of readers, there's a chance.
I agree that things can be "less than straightforward". This does not appear to be anywhere near one of those cases. The justifications for doing it in the timeframe given seems to be 1) bragging rights, and 2) "if we don't do it, someone else will". If we accept those as valid guidelines than we justify almost any sort of medical experimentation. I see no way that this experiment can be ethical or moral under modern practices.
Outsourcing medical trials to impoverished countries can be exploitative. The basic principle from the Declaration of Helsinki is that the "subject's welfare must always take precedence over the interests of science and society." The medical staff at the launch site, once the woman is there, should stop the experiment because the woman's welfare (and that of the soon-to-be child) would be better by not launching. It can be possible ignore those obligations for research purposes, but the expected result must be 'morally weighty', and expected to greatly benefit the population that the subject is from. That is not the case here.
Okay, then Gregorian is a calendar system and its representation as ISO 8601 includes a year zero (represented as 0000), making the Gregorian year 1900 part of the 20th century in that notation.
Minor complaint: the article mentions there are more germs than "even the surface of a toilet". Every (pop science) article I've seen on the topic says that the surface of a toilet is one of the most sanitary places in the house. So not a good comparison.