Taken together with your .sig (life isn't permanent) this is pretty funny. Orbits around the moon are not permanent, particularly low ones. Its mass distribution is not spherical and it has concentrations of mass in odd spots here and there. The eccentricity of the moon's orbit, together with these, add up to perturbations of any lunar orbit. You can occasionally spend a goodly amount of fuel to keep it there, of course.

Uh, no. Although there are perhaps reasons to go to the moon, there are good reasons not to as well. The 28-day lunar night will make it difficult to ever grow food or use solar power there, and the almost complete lack of volatiles will make any lunar resources extremely difficult to extract on site. And before anyone natters on about iron and titanium on the moon, look at the abundances of these; I've got better ores growing grass in my back yard.

And then there's that gravity well. It doesn't sound like much, but it's enough to be annoying and costly (all those steel beams you're manufacturing at the lunar Pittsburgh are going to need to get back to Earth orbit to be valuable, and the delta-vee for that is somewhere around 2.8 km/s.) To be long-term viable, the fuel for that is going to have to be produced on the moon (see aforementioned lack of volatiles.) The delta-vee budget to send something to the outer solar system from the moon's surface is only slightly less than to send it directly from low Earth orbit.

The Lagrangian points in the Earth-moon system are, in many ways, more attractive for settlement, provided that near-earth asteroids prove useful for raw materials. And even the surface of Mars makes more economic sense in supplying exploration and exploitation of the outer solar system.

Putting a telescope on a planet (or minor planet) is a waste. It's then limited to looking outward in one hemisphere, cannot point its antenna at Earth constantly, and is subject to the vagaries of atmosphere (even Pluto may have a bit in parts of its orbit.) It's also far more expensive (especially if there is no atmosphere) to land on something.

Let it float free in space, where it can ensure that it doesn't blind itself by looking at the sun, can easily move to point at any desired target, and can constantly talk to Earth.

Were this proposal not tied to another mission, perhaps the best approach would be a highly elliptical polar solar orbit. If sufficiently elliptical, the telescope would exceed its lifetime before it had to worry about passing through the ecliptic again.

Like what?

I'm being facetious, of course, but the problem with resources on the moon is the same one Earth has - a gravity well. The moon's is considerably less of a challenge, but is enough to make using lunar resources anywhere else uneconomic. And most of what we call "resources" on the moon would be considered "dirt" on Earth - just because we could extract metals from dirt doesn't mean that it's economically useful to do so. (Admittedly, this might well be simply because we haven't explored the moon sufficiently to recognize ores and ices that would be economically viable.)

The good reasons for going to the moon have nothing to do with shipping its stuff elsewhere. The lunar farside would make an excellent radio observatory, but even that use could be trumped by a free-flying observatory farther out.

Even more problematic are permanent human settlements on the moon. The long day/night cycle is not conducive to growing anything and prevents solar power from being useful. Being on the moon includes most of the difficulties of space travel - vacuum environment, radiation - with the added vexations of gravity (good for humans, tough on exports) and the 28-day bake/freeze thermal cycle.

I suspect that human lunar exploration is going to simply be a yardstick by which nations measure their technological prowess. Once they've planted their flag in the lunar soil and brought home a few rocks, they'll call it a day. Hopefully they then will move on to more useful ways of exploiting space.

That Congress will inevitably shank NASA's budget well before their choice of booster (Son of Shuttle) ever leaves the ground.

If you use hypergolic fuel/oxidizer combinations, you need no ignition source at all - they burn on contact.The Shuttle OMS engines were an example of this; they used hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. So was the first and second stages of Titan rockets, the Russian Proton series, etc. Such propellants are often the juice of choice for flights of long duration, as well, since no ignition source is required and they store well at moderate temperatures and pressures. Restarts and cutoffs are as simple as turning the valves.

For a really nasty fuel/oxidizer combination, there's chlorine triflouride and just about anything. It ignites on contact with glass. When exposed to water it releases steam loaded with hydrochloric and hydroflouric acid vapors. Standard procedure upon accidental release is to flee to minimum safe distance.

I would submit that humanity is in serious need of new frontiers.

The sky is falling, eh?

The ISS has been floating in a far more hostile micrometeorite environment than either interplanetary travel or Mars orbit represents. For years. (And only occasionally has to dodge a flying bolt.) Think of all the debris we've added to the near-Earth region - all that is missing, at least for now, from the rest of the solar system.

As for radiation, there is no doubt that cosmic rays, and even more so, solar activity, represent a risk. However, the MARIE instrument on the Mars Odyssey probe (designed specifically to quantify this) indicated that even a long conjunction-type mission to Mars would likely not exceed the 1 to 4 Sieverts recommended as a career maximum for LEO activities. (To be fair, MARIE gave its life in pursuit of this study, but it was completely unshielded from solar events. Just about every Mars mission plan includes a shielded safe haven for the crew, and we can now give good warning of solar radiation events.) I suspect that there is no shortage of astronauts that would give far more than their career radiation exposure limit to be part of a crew to Mars.

I fail to see the deterrence value unless said rock is in orbit.

There is a lot more to combat capability than is reported on "fly-offs", and dogfighting (which is the capability demonstrated in the videos you mention - the ones I saw, anyway) is not the preferred combat regime for any fighter pilot. I greatly prefer sticking a missile up his tailpipe from the longest range possible before he knows I'm even there. For instance, of around 40 confirmed kills by U.S. aircraft in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, 29 were with the obsolete Sparrow radar-guided missile, whose minimum range is about a mile. (And some of these were MiG-29s, shot down by F-15s of even older vintage.)

The pilot is what makes an airplane a weapons system. If for some reason (money being the usual - a typical mid-career USAF combat pilot has already cost his taxpayers several million dollars in training) you don't provide your pilots with sufficent and ongoing training and flight hours, he's simply operating a target. This has been borne out in every conflict since air war began - since you mentioned it, Germany in 1944-1945 is an excellent example - flying sometimes technically more advanced airframes, they lost big time. Fuel shortage and previous casualties combined to force them to field many pilots who were woefully undertrained. And while in the modern era third-world air forces have often been willing to procure modern weapons systems, historically they have been savaged by countries with better-trained men.

I would not put too much credence in the sales literature of any aircraft manufacturer. Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Argentina... all bought fighter aircraft off the marketing "glossies". The remains of their pretty airplanes dot various landscapes and sea floors.

... despite the fact that Australia (and NZ, for that matter) were rather poorly used by Britain in WWI and by the U.S. in WWII.

Perhaps more accurately, the Sun sucks a lot of things into Mercury. The planet is a vacuum bag on the Solar system's most impressive Hoover.

Confiscatory taxes on the middle class that are used to shift wealth to the segments of the economy that can't be bothered to work (or to prepare themselves for work) are not class warfare, eh?

If he's concerned about the state of the U.S. Government's finances (and what fine upstanding pillar of the community would not be?) and can afford extra taxes, he need not wait for Congress to get around to levying them. He can most certainly write a check and send it to the Bureau of the Public Debt (www.treasurydirect.gov, hear they'll be taking Paypal soon!) Impress us by handing it over to your local congresslut during a press conference on national TV, with all the zeroes visible to everyone.

Or perhaps he's only interested in someone else paying extra.

Kick in some of your pocket change, Buffet, or shut up.

Fighting Intel is definitely fighting The Man. Back in the 90s I worked with a computer company that developed and marketed their own RISC architecture chip. Intel spent more in R&D annually than our entire company revenues and, shall we say, has a well-funded in-house legal department. Needless to say, their software now runs exclusively on Wintel.