Hey, man never figured out how to fly, did he?

It always amazes me what people decide can not be done based on a sample population of one.

I don't think you realize just how many launches it would take to get useful scale solar in orbit. Its just not possible. The ISS took dozens of shuttle and soyuz/proton launches and it has a total capacity on the order of a few hundred kW. For space solar to be worth it, you'd need several hundred Megawatts, and it'd have to be cheap. If you can build panels on the moon and launch them electrically, you might hope to do it and clean up earth's power problem. If you build them on earth, you'd need thousands of launches at least.

A bootstrap type facility used to build progressively bigger sets of machine tools using in situ materials would certainly take more total launches than Apollo did. However, the total launched mass in machine tools to the moon would be far smaller than sending all of those solar panels up directly. Now, I'm not saying it is the only solution to our power problem, but it is a mighty attractive option and is certainly a way that a bootstrapped moon colony could be justified.

Additionally, of course, once you have people there, you could start to do other stuff that would be expensive to launch from earth. The science projects that you could do on the moon are frequently discussed, and if you had manufacturing capacity for satellites on the moon, along with a staging point for most of your equipment, a trip to mars would become much more feasible. Yeah, it would be easier to go directly to mars -- if that's all you wanted to do -- another flags and footprints mission. But if you want a supply train that leads to a multiplanet trading economy, a moon colony is a cornerstone.

Readily accessible bulk material already in orbit, along with tools to shape it into things we need would be a game changer. It would open up the whole solar system. Sure, getting off the planet would still be hard -- and it would do nothing for population pressures here on earth, but it would bring some of the more valuable assets of deep space into reach.

Are you joking? Iron makes up nearly 15% of the moon's crust, with local concentrations varying. The same goes for aluminum. The plurality of the atoms in regolith are silicon which is even MORE useful for making solar power satellites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_geology (see the table on the right).

As for the gravity well. Remember the saturn V? That was required to get men *to* the moon. Remember the small box at the bottom of the lunar lander? That was the rocket required to get men *back from* the moon -- with room to spare for a light truck, no less. The gravity well on the moon is much, much, much much smaller than that on earth. The technology used in linear motors on rollercoasters is more or less perfect for launching satellites from the moon, using the same type of solar panels you would be exporting as your power source.

The benefits of LEO are appreciable, but launching stuff from the surface of the earth is prohibitively expensive. If we could build stuff off earth, for use off earth, we'd be way better off. Sure, the up front costs are *enormous* but the long term payoff is there. The moon is close by, we know how to get there, and it has most of the materials for satellite building. A lunar colony could pay for itself by producing solar power satellites for use in LEO.

Of course. I like how you put words in his mouth and then get mad about them. I think I found your hat. It has tea bags hanging around the sides and says something about Obama being a socialist.

Look, I'm not saying the man is a saint or the hero that Gotham deserves, but at least lets not just make up shit out of whole cloth, 'kay?

I guess I've been out of the loop. The governor of Misourri is named Nixon? NIXON'S BAAACK!

Creative commons has a tool to help, and human readable licenses. I'd guess you can find what you need there. http://creativecommons.org/

How about just making "The Man In the High Castle" and have *it* star Harrison Ford? Think Chinatown for this century.

According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(spacecraft), in 4-6 years. Figure ten at the outside. I'd bet that could be accelerated to 2-3 years if NASA actually had the authority to tender a cash contract up front to get it flying next in two years with a moderate safety margin.

This seems like the kind of tax that GPS manufacturers would lobby for... "The market is already saturated with GPS devices? Let's make it illegal to not have TWO!"

How is a deal approved by government agents who are blatantly selling votes, for a service over a tightly government regulated slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, using only government approved equipment and with government sanctioned business practices in any conceivable way "lazziez-faire"? This doesn't in any way, remotely, resemble lazziez-faire. Just because republicans support it doesn't make it free market, unless you've been watching too much fox news.

Seriously? You've never heard of an interest rate? Opportunity costs? I'm not saying that a low inflation rate doesn't encourage investment now rather than later, but saying that there is no other incentive to investment is just silly. Also, the implication that deflation was the cause of the great depression and/or that it is a sign of times being terrible is also flat wrong. See "the great deflation" of the last three decades of the 19th century, in which the US went through a period of tremendous economic growth. I'm not saying deflation is necessarily a good thing, just that deflation isn't the end of the world. After all, for the saver, deflation is a great thing.

Tabletop fusion reactors have existed since the 1950s - created by Philo T. Farnsworth (who invented television as we know it, and who is paid homage to by futurama). They have never been (and likely never will be) able to produce more energy than it takes to fuse the atoms, thus making them impractical as a fusion *power plant* but a "reactor" nevertheless, and a practical source of free neutrons for research purposes, and projects like this.

Wait, are you making an offensive Muslim joke or an offensive tsunami joke?