Posted on 03/31/2018 1:47:39 AM PDT by LibWhacker
DREAM AGAIN ! ! !
Honest t'God, after reading this I was transported back to my Jr High days (late 50's early 60's) when outer space was a reachable dream in America.
Kennedy said we WILL do it and we did.
President Trump has broken the beurocratic stronghold on America's dream machine and turned us loose again.
Elon Musk just kept sloggin' along, "I THINK I can, I THINK I can, I THINK I can ... ) and look'a here !
Extensive feasibility comments at source article. Very interesting technical discussion.
Since every NASA project seems to take 50,000 years to complete these days, my distant ancestors might benefit from a Muslim outreach center on the moon to study global warming.
There’s bound to be something else much closer to home that we could waste a bunch of money on.
I dream of a secured border first before bases on the moon.
Just print a couple hundred billion $’s and we’re off to the moon!
It just so happens that Elon Musk ‘s name for his Lunar Base is “Moonbase Alpha”. Just so long as he is very careful about storing nuclear waste, we should be all right.
Have we done a NASA study to find out how the muslins feel about this? Nothing can be moved forward until they have good feelings.
Just print a couple hundred billion $’s and we’re off to the moon!
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Like the Apollo program, the money spent on a sound well thought out lunar program will return far more money than it took to create as well as new and beneficial inventions and discoveries - which like the computer and phone you use now, you will not want to live without. Nor when you go to the doctor the MRI machine, among a huge list of medical devises that keep people like you and me healthy and alive.
Here in Wisconsin, many used the same financial argument for getting the multi-billion dollar US Foxconn plant. They believed that spending $3 billion to get Foxconn was unacceptable and, as you said, a waste of money.
Turns out that for every $1 spent by the state, the return per year is $3 just for the plant itself. That figure does not count the return to the state from all the subsidiary and supply business which will build near it in Racine.
It takes money to make money. Risks are part of the game. Although some would prefer to watch China colonize the moon, reaping the benefits and gladly selling them to the US ‘cheap’. That is the “Make America Last Program” or “America’s No Future Project” or “Make America Great Again like Obama Did Proposition”.
And BTW for most everything the government does we print money to get these days - that is until we get America back on its collective feet financially which will take big expenditures to achieve - just like rebuilding the military money will have to be printed to return it to a viable force from the hollow collapsing shell Obama made.
I understand the benefits we gained from new technology that came from the space program years ago. But there needs to be a reason for the base other than that. So far no one has outlined the benefits that would come from a lunar base. It has to be beyond just being cool.
It’s actually easier to build something on the moon than earth because there are no EPA restrictions there.
Yet.....
...each mission that follows will require just one $100 million Falcon Heavy launch and one $60 million Falcon 9 launch to accomplish. Once the base is well-established, there will be little reason not to extend surface stays to six months. Assuming that cost of the mission hardware will roughly equal the cost to launch it, we should be able to create and sustain a permanently occupied lunar base at an ongoing yearly cost of less than $700 million. This is less than four percent of NASA’s current budget -- or about a quarter of what is being spent yearly on the agency’s now obsolete Space Launch System program which has been going on for over a decade without producing a rocket... Currently, NASA... is proposing to build... the Deep Space Gateway. This boondoggle will cost several tens of billions of dollars, at least, and serve no useful purpose whatsoever -- except perhaps to provide a launch manifest for the Space Launch System.
I don't generally hold Zubrin in very high regard, but he's been thinking these things over to the exclusion of most other things, and he nails it again, IMHO. Thanks LibWhacker.
[Z's critique of Musk's mars plan]
Is there a way to make a moon base pay for itself?
And we all know what happened on Sept 13th 1999. Will these science fools never learn?
Militarily the moon is the ultimate high ground. That’s reason enough.
That is 1 good reason...if we armed the station!
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