A chance to pay off your student loans without entering the glory-hole industry?

If we're going to give them all Aegis radars, they're going to need a lot of that juice for active sensors, the computers to run them, and the cooling to keep both from melting.

Shore bombardment is totally a thing.

This lets us do it from a safe range, or with surgical precision --- pick one.

Either a nuke, or a gas turbine; either coupled to a capacitor bank that's very close to inert when discharged.

I would cheerfully ride the business end of a NERVA in a return trajectory around Luna. Others have spent longer in the Van Allen belts and beyond with no ill effects, and good radiation shielding is a simple matter of math.

I would not volunteer for an explicit suicide mission to well, up.

There is a difference between pioneers and suicide bombers. Neither has a great life expectancy, but it's worth considering the relative merits of the two professions.

Old men who won't die of cancer, but will die with cancer. Actuaries would probably suggest that you haven't really made their situation significantly worse.

Actually, bullets (wrapped in duct tape) would be about the right size and consistency to patch a micrometeoroid strike.

Mars One is planning a colony drop, not a suicide mission. Colonies have a history of failing, but they also have a history of succeeding.

If we're talking about a mission with no hope of surviving to go on speaking tours, or build the foundation for a society elsewhere, I can't really see any good reason for it.

On the other hand, throw a NERVA, Orion, or a (FSM help you!) NSWR at the problem, and suddenly it's a shorter trip than most jaunts to the space station. If Bussard was 1/10th right, deep space missions won't be suicide missions.

Everyone has a different role. The tech-heads, hackers and code monkeys turn out the lights on everything, and the community organizers, rabble-rousers and the politically inclined makes trouble and pisses people off with rallies, publicity campaigns, grassroots social media campaigns, and crowdfunding primary challengers to anyone who doesn't wash their hands of this like yesterday.

And while I discourage actual violence, I feel the need to point out that so do the gun-nuts and paranoid survivalists - by raising the cost of a brute-force approach beyond the point of impracticality, they serve as a backstop to the morals of anyone who might actually be tempted to attempt a coup.