hehehe, we spent more than $100 billion just bailing out AIG, and many hundreds more on TARP.

The two recent wars are also a gigantic expense all their own and will likely top 3 trillion before the end of them both!

Too bad we had to spend nearly 2 trillion in all of this to make sure that C-level executives could keep their mansions at the expense of the nation they defrauded.

Glad my taxpayer dollars are going to good use! Where are the indictments of these crooks again?

I agree with Chris, people need to understand that NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket compared to the military or to bailing out all these failing companies and banks. In fact, if you compare the $100 billion budget for a moon landing or colony (over 10 years), that is still a drop compared to what the military or these bailouts cost in ONE YEAR.

I'm 110% for space exploration, it's exciting, I think the knowledge gained is well worth it. However - I want to know too - what is the purpose of going to the moon? Building the space station turned out to be a mess, as some idiot decided the second the space station is done - the shuttles are retired. Now we can't get to the space station that is finally completed except thru the Russians. Dumb!

So if we do this with the moon, let's make some goals - why do we want to go there? What do we want to accomplish? And then we need to figure out if it's worth it. I think the unmanned spacecraft have been super successful.

The other problem is, no NASA plan ever manages to stay alive when the next president comes into office. It always gets cancelled (with the exception of the Apollo program obviously).

Well, in terms of goals, we can start by prospecting. We know that the Moon has large reserves of gold and platinum group metals, why not pinpoint the deposits. It could be valuable data for any future exploitation operations and could also offer some scientific data regarding how the moon formed and how the minerals arrived there. Another possibility could be setting up a station to measure the levels of radiation received by the Moon and how the Earth's magnetic field affects that. Finally, it could be a test bed to try out new systems that would be needed to get to other destinations such as the SLS and a lander.

"For what we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, we could have sent over 100 Apollo missions to the moon."

But we didn't. And in the absence of those wars, we still would not have. What's your point?

Besides, I would say that something has gone astoundingly wrong, if we repeated the Apollo-style Lunar landing architecture 100 times, without going on to a more cost-effective approach.

Fortunately, (and without going back to something that looks like Apollo first) we still can...

If NASA were to need some ideas of what to do on the moon, here's a good to-do-list of big projects

1. Establish darkside/lightside observatory (optical and radio telescopes)
2. Seek to make colony fully self-sufficient
3. Establish Lunar resource utilization in additional to autonomous colony
4. Establish linear accelerator for non-chemical based earth-return and reversible for deep space exploration
5. Etc.

This could be a REALLY long list. But I see a Lunar colony like I see Jamestown, it was just the beginning, but gave a necessary foothold with which to go much much further.

best way to find out space is out ...is by giving this program to liars and crooks.

you guys already fell for it .. so now you know the moon is a lie. its not for living in just for looking...

If you study Florida history and Henry Flagler you'll learn why space exploration and a moon base is of value. Much of Florida was considered useless frontier land until Flagler built hotels and railroads (all the way to Key West). His pioneering spirit made much of Florida south of Jacksonville accessible and desirable when others told him it was a waste of money.

The profits of space exploration would be there in tourism plus resources. The benefits would be survival of the human race. Sadly, we'd rather spend that amount of money bailing out banks, lining pockets of politicians, and funding wars to kill each other. If every penny from the defense department of the top 10 major economies was placed into space explorations we'd be living on Mars and the moons of Jupiter within 20 years. We'd also have methods of more rapid deep space travel developed and planning on visiting other star systems.

Fantastic - Chris! We support you 100%! We will join you for fleeing the warring planet Earth with rampant of corrupted greedy crooks and go to search for a new peaceful harmony world! We do have a capability to develop new innovation to be self-sufficient on the moon base and even, a colony on Mars. Looked back in 1961 when the time of J.F.K speech, we did not have any capability for moon landing modules, vast oxygen tanks available and new technological equipment that did not exist till the year of the moon landing! Eight short years from 1961 to 1969 of amazing astounded speed in technological leaps from the first manned rocket lunch to the first men landing on the moon was incredible feats for our milestone of the American civilization!

The moon is very important to the future of humanity, because the future of humanity as a whole depends on our ability to spread out - to grow. Eventually this planet alone will not be able to sustain us, and we will need to move out. The moon will be essential for the future, and it will indeed prove very lucrative. Unfortunately, those who lay the 'groundwork' for the crossroads of humanity often flounder and fail (but make progress nonetheless) - until someone gets lucky and the 'stars-align' just right so that he succeeds where others have failed. Investors are extremely short-sighted, but someday the moon will be a major throughfare for all things space-related.

One of the main things the moon can offer for future projects is low gravity manufacturing and production. We could build things for space, in space and use a lot less energy doing it. There is also Helium 3 on the moon (rare on earth), and if we can further our nuclear power technologies - H3 could prove a very useful component for long-term power needs. It also could be a major conduit for just about any supplies or mined materials going to and from earth. That way most of the heavy equipment could be kept in space, and goods can be sent back in a much more cost efficient way.

Much of this could be accomplished with a space station / elevator system - but I think the moon would serve as a better long-term and permanent structure for distant future operations.

Put that money to use on our kids education, morons!

Then maybe we'll be able to figure out a better and more efficient means of space travel instead of a controlled explosion.......

Don't forget the nearly $1 trillion stimulus that created no jobs. At least we'd be on the moon for a heck of a lot less money and people would be paid for actually working.

Newt...Pig:

The US already spends much more on our education system than any other first world nation, and yet it's still failing. This is proof that you can't buy a good education if you can't quality-control the teachers/parents. I place much of the blame on the teachers' unions, but bad parents aren't excused, either. Either way, more money won't fix the problem.

C. Smith,

Yeah, like mining moon rocks will.... lol

If the edumacation system ain't working then spend this money on fixin it..... duh

C. Smith, thank you!

When are people finally come to terms with the fact that we spend more per student than any other nation on the face of the planet on students and yet our return on investment gets worse as the money for education increases?

The issues that are hindering education is not money. This is a social problem. We need to stop trying to fix every social ill with money when it simply doesn't work. We need to seriously set ourselves down on the individual level and see our own failings and correct them first. We need to be better people. Money isn't going to do that.

Mining moon rocks is such an inspiration!

Get real! Using huge wasteful and inefficient rockets to blow people into space was a bold and inspiring project ... for LAST CENTURY!! Get some new ideas and stop wasting our kids future on USELESS WARS and STUPID MOON BASES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@ NewtISaPIG

Why does it always have to be treated as a zero-sum game. NASA provides demand for cutting edge science and engineering jobs on a scale that the private sector cannot hope to ever match.

Quality education in the hard-sciences helps qualify people to get these cutting-edge jobs and expand the human race's capabilities and resolve.

We need both, not one or the other.

@ C. Smith

Agreed! We need to get serious about public service unions. I think that it is a conflict of interest with the state. The voters and parents should be the final say in the performance of a school system from administration down to teachers, not its unions. The US's public school system was world-renowned back when communities had more say and the administrations weren't so top-heavy and unions so protectionist and hostile

Here's my ideal restructuring (step-by-step) of the national public education system from the federal level.

1. Require a student/teacher ratio of no more than 25:1
2. Dissolve all top-heavy administrations. Teachers unions may continue to exist, but they lose all say on hirings/firings and performance metrics...those are to be decided by public voter appointments ONLY.
3. Institute entrance tests for students in each grade level that shows a student's base-line performance and growth between grades (or maintenance for the high(er)-performers). Teacher performance will be based on how their students' aggregate performance improves between their grade and the next. Additional pay accumulates from students that maintain a higher performance rate in the grade after as well...this accounts for the cumulative value of a good education.
4. Raise teacher pay not on seniority but by performance and professional background that they may bring. Under-performing teachers will be required to take additional training while routinely under-performing teachers will be let go.
5. Teacher pay will ALWAYS rise before administrator pay. Principal performance will be based on their aggregate teacher performance and also by how many additional non-sport electives they offer and or have their students enrolled in. Schools that offer shop, mechanics, home economics, chemistry, CAD, total immersion language, etc. will see their principal's pay increase (subject to same student/teacher performance tests). Schools without the resources or room to offer these services can also see the administrator's pay increase if they can send their students to other districts to fill vacancies in such electives. District administrator's pay will increase/decrease based on aggregate principal performance (which is ultimately tied to the teachers/students) and the schools ability to provide those additional education electives for their district.
6. Parents and principals should have the authority to fire teachers with cause, rather than appeal to a central board. Unions shall have no right to appeal.
7. Parents should be required to take a test at the beginning of each school year as well. This is to establish a baseline to see if the child has the appropriate resources at home to help with homework. If the child's performance is lacking while the parents are qualified in the material, the parents and student are brought in to discuss the following:
8. Under-performing students will be required to take additional tutoring and summer courses (at the parents' expense) to bring up their grades, if they still do not improve, they are moved to a school that specializes in catching them up.
9. Bullying is not to be tolerated. Unlike schools' ridiculous "zero-tolerance" policies towards drugs and kids even so much as drawing a weapon on a piece of paper...bullying shall be the zero-tolerance prime directive. Bullies will be removed from schools after one warning and required to undergo psychological analysis and the parents are to be interviewed by both CPS and analyzed themselves. Habitually troubled-children will be removed from the school and required to join a strict and regimented academy that not only focuses on education, but also self-discipline. Parents will lose partial custody of the child during this time.

Thoughts?

NewtISaPIG - You raise a great point. When we as a nation finally abolish the Teacher's Unions of America, which clearly have been inefficient?

im all for exploration, moon bases, eventual colonization of mars, etc. but we have to prioritize and fix our home planet issues 1st. what good is discovery if children are starving back home?

Drezz - Do you have a mortgage? How about a car payment or student loan? Do you send every dollar that you make to pay your off your debts, or do you spend some of it on other things?

It's kind of like that. If you said you wanted to eradicate poverty or homelessness before "X", you're never going to do "X".

Drezz-2874852

what good is discovery if children are starving back home?

That is so narrow sighted, do you not know all of the contributions to humanity that NASA research has brought us? How about compact water sterilization, food preservation, fuel cell technologies, solar panel R&D, etc.

There are tons of innovations that are the result of the US Space Program that has helped the starving children and help regions with disaster recovery.

You need to understand the value that R&D has. Just because the goal is to go into space, the problems that are solved to get there can be applied in soooooo many different ways!

^_^

NASA is one of the best investments our country makes. If you don't think so, then you just don't understand how integral NASA was and is to establishing and maintaining so many various aspects of our current way of life.

At a mere 0.6% of the federal budget, NASA is a bargain.

Seriously? No...Really?!--If I am a teacher in Massachusetts with well-fed, "Yankee" English speaking students from wealthy families who value education--my students will progress from year to year whether I am great, mediocre, or lousy as a teacher. If I am a teacher in East St. Louis with students who do not get enough to eat, who are exposed to toxins, who hang out with people who have a strong, non-standard dialect, who have parents who do not have enough to eat and are exposed to toxins, and who do not really see education as valuable--my students will not progress from year to year in a reliable way even if I am super-teacher.

Here's the real kicker: if I am a teacher in the Bible Belt, with students whose parents think that all teachers are "liberal brainwashers," and with students who are told to distrust any information which suggests that the world is older than 5000 years (like history, geology, astronomy, etc.), that Thomas Jefferson was actually an important historical figure in the US, and that our legal code was inherited from Britain (which inherited theirs from Rome, which inherited theirs from Hammurabi) and is not based on Biblical scriptures--my students will not reliably progress from year-to-year even if I display the Ten Commandments on my wall, sponsor Youth for Christ, and keep a shelf full of King James Bibles for them to read in class when they are not working.

I have been a teacher--some classes advance because the students are eager to learn and fun to work with, and some classes are a bust because they have either a couple of problematic personalities or because the parents are undermining the course. It is incredibly naive to think that teachers somehow control learning--if one has lousy textbooks that have been filled with nonsense because it suits the conservatives in Texas, and one has students who do not want to learn or parents who don't want them to learn standard curricula, and one has an administration that mostly wants to warehouse the students until they age out of the system, have a lot of fun encouraging learning.

Teachers do not control their classrooms--they don't pick their own books, they don't pick their own curricula, they don't get to choose their teaching methods, they have no power to discipline students effectively, etc. Adding injury to insult, a person with a college degree specializing in education starts at a salary only slightly higher than that of the principle's secretary (who only needs a high school diploma) and lower than that of the janitors: it is $31K (there is an additional $3K in "benefits" that one will never actually get--since the legislature is rapidly dismantling teacher retirement) in my neck of the woods. A step increase is perhaps $500 a year ($42 a month), and one is very lucky to get it as many school districts renege on their step increases when they don't have the funds. A person with a college degree and 15 years of experience gets $38K. You know, you can find this information if you go to your local school and look at the teacher's contract--teachers don't make much money, which is why the average teacher only lasts 3 years these days.

Why evaluate teachers? Try evaluating the text books, try evaluating the principals, try evaluating the curricula, try evaluating the allowed teaching methods, try evaluating the students' motivation. When the average teacher only lasts 3 years already--get it in your head that teachers are like waitstaff, they are the people that you notice when you are in the restaurant, but not the ones who control the restaurant. A really bad waiter can ruin an experience in a restaurant--just as a really bad teacher can ruin a class--but most restaurants are reflective of things way beyond the waitstaff and most teachers are at worst mediocre because the job pays so badly that education departments draw from the lowest performing 20% of any university.

Seriously--do you really think that if you start firing teachers that miraculously you are going to have really good teachers pop out of the woodwork? When the pay is so low and is going to stay that low? Teachers already leave, typically, in the first three years--it's like firing waitstaff when it's the cook that's lousy.

In any case, most parents (particularly in the Bible Belt) don't want teachers to teach--they want teachers to hand out A's to little Johnny or Jane. It's like firing the pagent directors when they don't pick your kid--maybe your kid is ugly; in the case of students, or maybe your kid is lazy/stupid/drugged. If you ran a restaurant, would you let the customers who are the noisiest (the ones, typically, who are looking for a free meal by being abrasive) fire your staff when the staff is being firm about policy?

Go ahead--enact your little list of anti-teacher policies. Then, when there isn't anyone who wants to be a teacher under those circumstances (I sure wouldn't--most of the people I know who have been in teaching for a long time are currently looking to retire early and get the heck out of Dodge), what will you do? People will last one year and then leave rather than three--and you will have the same revolving door that one has with waitstaff. And, this is an improvement?

Personally--I will bet that you are one of those people who thinks that children should progress no matter what as long as the teacher is a "good teacher." Really? Why don't you go teach in a typical high school for a couple of weeks and figure out why that is nonsense? Why don't you try watching an unedited video of your own kid's behavior at school and figure out that s/he isn't exactly an angel?

Parents have power over their children--they are with them over the long term and can mold them. A teacher sees a kid for 6 hours a day or perhaps only 1 hour a day. Seriously--such a person is the determining factor for whether or not your kid is learning? Apart from the truly bad teachers--and I've seen a few--teachers are probably the least important factor in a student's education.

@ beanathome

I'm more than happy for suggestions, I'm not anti-teacher, I'm anti: bad teacher, top-heavy administrations and unjustly protectionist unions.

I compiled that short list based on a couple of goals and a thought on how to reach them...it's far from comprehensive and full of holes.

As for the complaint about the students' background and how that would effect teacher performance-pay...that's why I insisted that the parents take aptitude tests right along with their kids. The idea is to create a profile and a baseline of the student and the resources they have at home for learning. The performance pay is also based on marginal improvement, not simply general aptitude, so parents that didn't care or lacked the education, those factors would be accounted for in the student's performance analysis. I also suggested that the parents would have to pay for tutoring in subjects where their child is doing poorly...there's nothing like hitting someone in the pocket-book to get them to budge the way you want them to.

Additionally, I suggested having the local community and the local principal have authority over hiring/firing because it adds accountability and gives control to the community over the quality of school that they can have. Not like what it is now in many massive school districts where the inner-city teachers are often the rejects that can't be fired or simply lacking the seniority in the Union to get into the better neighborhood schools, so they get shunted off to the worst performers because there's no one influential who sends their kids to such a school that would circumvent the system with their connections (e.g. why Beverly Hills PS has great teachers but many poor neighborhoods do not).

I came out of LAUSD, I've seen first-hand what the creme de la creme of incompetent and insane teachers are like, and the do-nothing administration that's just there to collect a paycheck. LAUSD and the CA Teachers Union are notoriously bad. There's nothing like adding accountability and applying pay based on performance to help weed out a lot of the under-performers.

I gave you a +1 because I think you made a good rebuttal, give me some suggestions on how you think we can bring the US's public school system back into the top rankings in the world

Go to the following link:

http://biotronics.newsvine.com/_news/2012/02/04/10314951-why-newt-gingrichs-moon-base-will-remain-an-impossible-dream

Biotronics, are you going to canvas that article in every thread?

The sad truth is space exploration has long since expired as a viable political tool, and as such, will see its funding surely and steadily dwindle away as more politically "sexy" projects come into vogue. Reagan milked the last few gasps of political life out of the space program with his SDI initiatives, and they managed to breathe a little life back into it with the Mars rovers of the 90s and early 2000s. Even Bush made a half-hearted attempt to renew a little interest in moon missions before the world went all to heII after 9/11.

You can't expect people to get excited about a $100+ billion moon project when maybe 25 or 50 people will get to actually go there. It's an abstract concept that not a lot of people will support because they either don't understand or don't care about the long-term impact.

Personally (and sadly), I almost wonder if NASA is as obsolete as its shuttle program?

Don't get me wrong, I love NASA. And, i think it's contributed more to mankind than any other institution. It's just that (as you pointed out) at the end of the day, it's still a government institution. It's still run by bureaucrats that know very little about actual science. Forget about what the actual scientists say at NASA, their budgets (and therefore their goals) are cloaked in political ideology that stifles real progress. And this goes for both sides of the political landscape.

I wonder if private entrepreneurs (who are solely interested in science, exploration, and the betterment of mankind) is what will constitute the future of our specie's space program?

I mean, just look around. It's 2012, and we haven't even been back to the moon?!? Ask the astronauts of the last moon mission flown and see what they would have thought if you were to tell them that all those years ago. It's really quite disgusting.

Chad, my only problem with what you said is that entrepreneurs are not usually motivated by science; they are motivated by profit. Currently, there is no profit in space exploration. If we did wish to do private exploration, it would probably come in the form of the government and private institutions providing cash prizes for obtaining specific data that they need for their projects. While I can see you point, the truth is that the money has to come from somewhere, and not many people have that kind of cash on hand.

"It would be a refreshing change of pace if it were not up to every political hack to be able to completely rework the entire direction of NASA's manned space flight on a whim."

On the other hand, Constellation is evidence that sometimes you need to 'rework' things, when they're going in a bad direction...

(My first hint that this was going down the wrong path, was when it was decided that the Altar lander was going to be another expendable, two-stage, hypergolic-fueled craft, and not the methane-burning, single-stage, refuelable reusable craft I had expected...what kind of next-generation of Lunar operations could we have, if we threw away the lander every time, again? Constellation continued to look worse and worse, delivering less new capability for more money, ever since...)

Besides, if NASA had total autonomy, expect every other government agency to demand it, too. Government space isn't sacred. No one will want to set that precedent.

I don't think the private sector will fund its own way into space until there's a sufficiently near-term profit motive to justify such a thing.

We can be pretty confident that some booming industries of the future will be:

Space mining

Space manufacturing for terra firma

Space manufacturing for space exploration

LEO livery

Orbital livery

Problem is that most of these ventures are still many decades out (unfortunately). To the pioneer go the spoils, but no private enterprise is going to risk billions to do something like that because the payout timelines are far and away longer than the patents from such an R&D venture would last...and no business wants to give their competition a leg-up in innovation if they don't have to...look at the concern over turnaround time that big pharmaceuticals have over drug patents and the time to get FDA approval and release to market.

Frank Glover

Besides, if NASA had total autonomy, expect every other government agency to demand it, too. Government space isn't sacred. No one will want to set that precedent.

As of yet, not too many agencies can show the amount of beneficial impact they've had on the US economy the way NASA can. I say we should give autonomy only to non-law enforcement agencies that can scientifically show the dollar/dollar benefit they bring to the economy to the level of say: the public university system or NASA

The profits for private space industry are 10-20yrs out at best and no companies are that far-sighted in the US.

So here's the proposal, The US reduce it's defense dept. to a minimum to defend the US and shift those military bases/resources into a space program so the economy would continue to grow, just in a different direction. Let anyone know that if they attacked us we'd not attack them in a ground war but nuke them out of existance. I'd bet that China and others would quickly follow, as the country who was able to live beyond Earth would gain the ability to destroy all others at will. We partner with China in space exploration and stop the insane killing of each other as we'd have a mutual superordinant goal.

This would bring people together vs. war that creates sides and destruction, which is probably why it would never happen.

@ Mike P101

I would totally get behind your proposal if we could be 100% sure that all of the idiots around the world that we made our enemies wouldn't take the opportunity of us downsizing our military to exploit the power-vacuum we leave in our wake.

Most notably:

China

India

Pakistan

N. Korea

Myanmar

Iran

Saudi Arabia

Syria

etc.

In all, it could get ugly fast if the US doesn't act carefully in diverting its resources to a far more noble venture than blowing up angry religious zealots and Peshawar cave-dwellers.

But never the less, I agree with you on principle and think that this should have been done decades ago!

Mike P101: Yeah, but for every dollar we spend on defense, we spend 2.5 on "entitlements". Just say'n.
http://raymondpronk.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/800px-fy2010_spending_by_category.jpg&sa=X&ei=SPiFToH1CcXL0QHdxZX-Dw&ved=0CAoQ8wc&usg=AFQjCNFZxvtkjXP1sPGOUE0N-oH31-UnZw

Nasa as a line item comes in 17th as far as spending percentages go.

Just disbanding the Department of Education -- which hasn't helped and has probably HURT U.S. education since Carter founded it in 1979 -- would alone increase NASA's funding 350% and add $45 Billion to NASA's $18 Billion budget per year. (Numbers FY2010 budget).

Seriously> I agree that other countries would become excited over filling the power vacuum. But other than China it would take them 20+ years to become a serious threat. I think China would actually go along with our shift as they tend to be much more forward thinking than we are these days. A war with China would mean destruction for both of us so they realize it's not an option.

If we fail to get the world rallied around a larger goal then we're doomed to die on this rock either by killing each other off or by a natural catastrophe of global proportion.

Mark> I'd be for shifting those funds around as well. Put people to work!

So what if we were told that in 100 years this planet was going to be uninhabitable? We'd either stick our heads in the dirt or we'd pull together to stop our stupidity and find a way to move. Looks like many here support our head in the sand.

Mike P101

Looks like many here support our head in the sand.

Cigarettes are not addictive.

Global warming is a lie

The Exxon oil spill is not that bad

The BP oil spill is not that bad

We've got Fukushima under control...no need for your assistance

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sound familiar?

There are vested interests with a lot on the line if they are shown to be a grave threat. There's no money in admitting there's a problem outright because you'd have to shut down your operations early. It's better to obfuscate, delay and deny for as long as possible until it's shown without a shadow of a doubt what the answer really is.

Then there are those that refuse to believe that we need to be responsible for how we conduct ourselves. Simply saying that it's God's will or that humanity is but too infinitesimally small to have a real impact on anything is just a cop-out for things that are just too scary to rationalize.

I think that some people misunderstood my last post. I am not endorsing private space exploration at the expense of NASA. I was just suggesting goals for a theoretical moon base mission. I would envision such a venture as a joint operation between NASA, corporations, and the space agencies of other countries to spread out the expense and reduce the barrier to entry. One such projects develops the necessary technologies, corporations will use them to exploit space to their own benefit and take up independent R&D. NASA would then be free to push ever farther into the known universe and gather scientific data.

Go to the following link:

http://biotronics.newsvine.com/_news/2012/02/04/10314951-why-newt-gingrichs-moon-base-will-remain-an-impossible-dream

It doesn't matter anymore whether or not NASA has accomplishments to celebrate. The population has become jaded by decades of science-fiction pablum that makes the average Joe think that a moon base is a simple thing with no purpose other than to fight off hordes of Klingons or stormtroopers. Back in the 60s, it was a thrilling concept. Now, I'd bet even money that you could approach your average Luddite on the street and they'd think we already have lunar installations. Throw in your standard budget-hawk politician who waves a "pointless" expensive space program at voters as an example of government waste, while simultaneously signing bills that provide hundreds of billions of dollars for overseas wars under the guise of "defending freedom", and it's no wonder our population no longer has the stomach for a space program.

Valid points, all of em'

But, perhaps we could simply phrase it as an imperative for the survival of our species?

We have to migrate from Earth ... we simply have to. It's not a matter of if, but when, will our planet become hostile to life as we know it? Hopefully not for a very long time, but it's still going to happen. The only logical progression of our species is upward and outward. All it will take is one good asteroid "lost in the shuffle" ... and we are not talking about wars, or climate change, or poverty, or the economy ... we are not talking at all (because we just became dinosaurs.)

No, we DON'T have to migrate from Earth. Earth is the only place we know of that is hospitable for us, if we can't survive here we can't survive anywhere else, either. Any "space colony" would be highly dependent on supplies from Earth, if Earth fails, they are doomed, too.

Much better to concentrate our time, effort and money into maintaining Earth as our home, and protecting it from damage.

Oh, so when the sun finally decides to expand into our orbit and envelop Earth just before it explodes ... I guess we should just say: "Oh well ... it's been a good run?"

You're taking my comments completely out of context and overlaying a huge strawman right over top of them. I never said we shouldn't take care of our planet. I'm merely pointing out the inevitabilities of the circumstances we find ourselves in. While the sun's death is obviously an extremely far off example, there are myriads of other problems that we will face in the near-to-distant future that will make our planet less-than habitable. In order for mankind to survive, we simply must look at a time when we leave Earth. All the environmental conservation in the world won't save our planet from a massive, rogue asteroid with a trajectory in which we can't influence from Earth.

Cm, That's gotta be the MOST short-sighted reply thatI've EVER read... Although protecting earth from "dinosaur killer" asteroids DOES have it's benefits.....

"To paraphrase Pres. Kennedy, we should go there not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Yes, we should go to Mars and asteroids, but the moon will make a nice waystation."

It will have that experience value (there are more places in the solar system that are similar to Earth's Moon, than are similar to Mars), but the Moon has research and possible resource value in its own right.

To think of it as just a stopping-off point is leapfrogging, not exploration. We'll never be 'finished' with the Moon. Otherwise, there will be the inevitable day that someone says 'been there, done that' about Mars (which we also will never be finished with), and will be itching to 'move on' to the moons of Jupiter.

"It's not a matter of if, but when, will our planet become hostile to life as we know it?"

This will happen well before we think if we continue to pollute the air, water and destroy forests and agricultural soil.......damn governments that hate progress and job creation and the EPA thing that has so many rules and regulations...........so then what would we provision the future colonies with if the earth no longer is capable of even sustaining anyone here? Tough growing potatoes on the moon or mars without help from home; maybe we should all develop a taste for algae to prepare for the migration.

CM... The same argument was used while germany was progressing on allies in WWI and II. There was much the same attitude of some people in Europe when it came to exploring the Americas, but those opposers quickly faded.

The greatest threat is over-population. So you're in full support of imposing birth control on all nations? Hawking said it best when he said our survival as a species is dependent on our getting off of this planet.

If we want to go to Mars, we really need to understand the effects of long-term exposure to low gravity. The moon would make an ideal research station for this study, as it's nice and close so if some emergency pops up it is still feasible to launch escape pods or send in a rescue team. It would also be hugely beneficial to have the ability to construct the Mars ship on the moon and launch it from there, as opposed to launching all the material up from Earth. As others have said, mining is also going to be a major focus on the moon - Mining company execs are already expressing a legit interested lunar mining and asteroid mining in the future. As Alan's article says, these things are no longer flights of fantasy.

Space mining and space fabrication is the key to all of this.

No navy has ever constructed something as complex as an aircraft carrier by fitting the pieces into a cannon and firing them out into the open ocean to then get pieced together by crew in rubber rafts 2 weeks at a time...but that is basically the equivalent of how we built the ISS with the Space Shuttle and Soyuz.

Dry-dock is the key to making a proper vessel, and until we develop an orbiting (or lunar) one, we're not going to have a suitable way of navigating the final frontier with anything even remotely reliable or robust.

SNR is right of course... having to design spaceships that have to traverse an atmosphere is a huge limitation.
Imagine being able to construct a space ship (in LEO or on the Moon) that is half a mile long, a tenth of a mile wide, and able to carry pretty much anything you wanted to between nearby astronomical bodies with a small fleet of shuttles.
THIS would make space-prospecting and actual colonies possible, both economically and logistically. It wouldn't be glamourous nor particularly fast, but we're talking bulk freight here.

@ Mark from Bridgeport

Agreed.

I think first an foremost, we need to get compact fusion-power up and running so that we can have more energy independent craft that can utilize energy thrust as opposed to chemical thrust.

After that, we can start with the orbiting dry dock and really get the ball rolling on the more ambitious missions.

Go to the following link:

http://biotronics.newsvine.com/_news/2012/02/04/10314951-why-newt-gingrichs-moon-base-will-remain-an-impossible-dream

Stephen: What could possibly be "shortsighted" in protecting our most valuable asset, the only place we know of that is hospitable to life and us? Since we don't have enough financial resources for everything, we have to prioritize, and keeping Earth in good condition should be a much higher priority than trying to establish tiny colonies on other planets that are dependent on Earth for vital supplies.

Mike P101: I'm totally baffled by your nazi analogy, it seems a total non-sequitur. As for the "Exploring America", the "New World" wasn't nearly as hostile as outer space, colonies here quickly became self-supporting and didn't need constant re-supply from Europe. Nor was it nearly as costly as space exploration, even when adjusted for inflation, and there was considerable profits to be made. With the current high cost of space travel, there is no possibility of a profit, and any colonies would operate at a huge loss.

If you think we can solve our overpopulation problems by exporting the excess to other planets, you really don't understand how geometric progression works. Currently, the population doubling time is about 46 years, for sake of argument lets assume a 50 year doubling time, and a maximum population of 14 billion. Since the current world population is 7 billion, we'd reach that level in just 50 years - and in the next 50 years we'd have to export 14 billion people - that's 280 million people each year - just to stabilize the population. The following 50 years we'd not only have to find space in space for another 14 billion from Earth, but also an additional 14 billion from the spacers. The mathmatics is unavoidable and unmistakable - birth control is essential, voluntary if possible, imposed if it becomes necessary. Birth control is far far better than controlling population by death - famine, war, disease, crime.

CM.. I was referring more to the isolationism and we must protect our own shores attitude of the US at the time vs. the Nazi movement. On a planetary scale we are isolating ourselves and given an external threat we would be caught rushing madly to play catch up. I agree that I could have made that a bit clearer.

I disagree that there is no profit to be had in space. There are large chunks of ice filled with various elements floating around. One day we may need to mine/harvest those to maintain our own viability.

I see over-population as mostly destroying the planet, as people are not going to engage in population control thus given the almost inevitable destruction of the Earth's resources. Many have written books on the topic, mostly from a very liberal viewpoint but still very pointed in the predictions. The only hope for the human race is to progress outwards.

I do agree that we need to protect the Earth!!! as much as possible but the amounts we spend on wars massively dwarfs anything spent on space exploration. We spend approx .5 of 1% of the national budget on space, with DOD at 28 times as much as spent on space exploration. Americans spend 31 times more each year gambling, 3X as much on alcohol, and 3.5X as much on frozen dinners as space exploration. Given our amount of waste, spending on something with potential for actual spillover benefits makes sense.

I appreciate your rational debate though.. Often people just name call on newsvine.

Gotta protect those oil interests somehow, I suppose... and what better way than at taxpayer expense?

Imagine if Shell and Exxon had to fairly deal with these regions, and dare I say it, face direct competition?

*GASP* I said the C-word didn't I!!!

Quick! Have Congress/Senate craft a larger oil subsidy and delay collection of oil royalties!

I call them "multi-generational welfare" types

That is b*ll@!$%#! I have been out of work for nearly four years without collecting the government welfare! Even, I am disabled (hearing impaired and blind in one eye) and I lived through numerous discrimination, prejudice and ignorance in the job market. It is tough out there, especially for long-term unemployed people. Unfortunately, you failed to recognize this tragedy things for being unemployed for a long time without any luck of getting a liveable waged job nowadays! The best solution is to create jobs by sending unemployed disabled people to the moon base and even, colonize on red planet Mars! Then I am deserved to go to the outer space and that will significantly reduce the unemployment rate and even, lower the federal deficits too.

I'm not so worried about welfare recipients as I am about the corporate bailouts and the huge amounts of money being spent to buy politicians by lobbyists and special interest groups. Some companies spent more on lobbying than they paid in federal taxes last year. Where do you suppose all that money comes from? We the consumers, that's who.

But gee look at all these neat space rocks we mined!!

@ Unemployed Jeff

You are one of the people that I'd be glad would be getting support from our government and protection from discrimination on the job market, and I'm impressed with your resolve to avoid partaking regardless.

I think we need a social safety net, but we need to have it for US citizens that need it. Not criminals that shouldn't be here, or crooks that don't need it.

The problem is that for every person like you, there are throngs of illegal aliens using their children's social security numbers to fleece off the public dole while they work tax-free under the table, and there are scores of small-time parasites that are just lazy and have been living off of the government-tit with fake injury/disability claims to collect SSI, Medicaid and welfare for over a generation.

But even so, the money spent on those losers in a decade is not even 25% what our government spent on the bailouts and not even 1% of what the Fed did.

Most people who collect food stamps and other social benefits, like low income housing and subsidized day care, are not unemployed. The most effective way to reduce spending on social programs would be to double the minimum wage. We're not really supporting the food stamp recipient. We're supporting the company, which ought to damn well pay it's employees enough to feed themselves.

Does the H3 on the Moon make it feasible to build power stations there and beam power back to earth? I understand that there have been recent advances in broadcast power transmission.

@ SonofMollyM

Problem with doubling the minimum wage is that you merely decrease the amount of people employed in those low-skill jobs. These minimum wage jobs should not be designed to support a family...these should be for teenagers and part-time workers, there's just not enough value-add for such work that would negotiate a higher pay like an engineer or accountant-by-trade could.

You have to figure the market-value of a job...every job in fact.

Someone who flips burgers or waits tables requires no substantial education, just training, professionalism and perseverance. Those types of jobs don't demand a high pay because anyone with an even half-way decent work-ethic can work in one.

Jobs that require a trade or higher education cannot merely be filled by anyone with a desire to work...there's a certain BFOQ that they must meet before even applying (e.g. college, trade-school, etc.).

If we want to help the people on welfare, foodstamps, and other subsidies I would require that they MUST WORK in order to receive it. All but the people too disabled to work should be required to work and or go to school and major in a skill that will get them better employment and they must graduate successfully within the appropriate period and then apply for work to keep the benefits coming. The government already has avenues for people to find education/employment because that's what they use for ex-cons and others coming off of the public dole.

As an added bonus, because one would have to show a W2 or 1099 in order to collect the public subsidies, nearly all of the illegal aliens fraudulently utilizing these programs would not be able to collect.

You're forgetting that there's a really, really simple solution to the radiation problem: don't build flimsy, above-ground habitats. Bury 'em. A meter or so of either lunar regolith or Martian soil would provide adequate protection against radiation for both astronauts, and later, hydroponic crops to support independent populations.

We make our own magnetic fields, which is not that hard, their already prototypes designs for such shields for space ships.

In fact, take a look at one of the side-missions of the alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS) on the ISS. Aside from testing for the existence of dark matter and such, they are also testing to see how much radiation the magnetic field is able to deflect.

How would you make your own gravity? Our bodies have evolved, over many millions of years, in a one-G environment. They don't respond well to values appreciably lower than that, and I don't think anyone has found a good way to counteract the effects.

@ EarlyOut-1524710

Not true, there's exercise equipment on the ISS to counter the effects. There are also designs of spacecraft that substitute gravity for centripetal force. There also seem to be some promising drugs on the horizon that may also counter-act these effects...if those pan out, we could then also give NASA credit for curing osteoporosis and muscle atrophy.

^_^

I would think the moon's one eighth gravity would make it a desirable location for a retirement colony.

"So, is my mother moving in with us? Or would you rather send her to the moon?"

Here's a neat resource just from the Apollo Program

NASA as a whole has delivered even more

One of my favorite things about investing in space exploration and NASA as a whole is that unlike defense contracting, which is another government funded R&D program; NASA's patents don't usually get locked up as classified national-security interests...which means that when NASA commissions for a design and a patent is created, NASA will charge virtually nothing in royalties for using said patent(s), which means that the technology is essentially public domain right out of the gate!

Compared with defense contracting, there is still battery technology from the 1960's and 70's used on submarines that remains classified to this day! No wonder there's a military industrial complex and not a space industrial complex...imagine being able to create a patented design that stays under lock and key for over 30 years instead of the standard patent expiration time-frames! Even though the contractor doesn't own the patent, the secrecy of such designs isn't going to be shared with the competition, which assures non-standard designs and the ability to lock the government into proprietary directions that are incompatible with possible competitors. From a functional standpoint, the contractor has constructive control of the design, even if they don't own the rights to the patent.

Moreover, the Ansari prize winner was just a short suborbital hop, of no use other than a simple thrill ride for the very rich.

Currently, the only space activity that makes economic sense are communication and observation satellites, manned space flight is simply too expensive to make any sort of profit. Now, if the cost of getting to orbit was reduced by several orders of magnitude, then we might see profit from manned space flights. That's why I think NASA should concentrate on cost cutting measures and more economical technologies for space travel.

"Moreover, the Ansari prize winner was just a short suborbital hop, of no use other than a simple thrill ride for the very rich."

And yet there are research entities already lined up to use them. These craft are also, by default, large, manned sounding rockets.

And what, exactly, is wrong with making money from people willing to pay for an otherwise unobtainable experience? Showing that there's a market for suborbital tourism makes it easier to justify the eventual development of orbital tourism...and like commercial aircraft, when you have something with the necessary reliability and low operational cost, it doesn't care what the purposes of its passengers is, or if it's carrying cargo at the same price, either.

@ CM-6969

Actually, I think quite the opposite for NASA.

Let the private sector figure out how to squeeze more blood from that turnip. NASA should focus on pioneering and bleeding-edge fields.

I want more money into fusion, advanced robotics and AI, precession thrust, VASIMR, linear accelerated launch systems, space fabrication/mining, etc.

I think NASA spending time trying to trim the edges off of now mundane functions would be better suited to the private sector where efficiency is critical but risk-taking is not.

NASA can take risks on new technology because they don't have a profit motive that holds them back.

Seriously - Reading though your link on precession thrust.... O.O wow!

@ Brokinarrow

Isn't that something?!

What are your thoughts?

I think we need a prototype built to see if it'll work as theorized. If so it'd be revolutionary!

@ Brokinarrow

You could probably build a prototype in your garage!

It sounds like its basically 2 gyroscopes on actuators attached across from each other by a central shaft. Where the forced tilting on a gyroscope creates a torque and the other gyro counter acts all but one of the torquing forces, creating either a 3d spacial movement or a 2d rotation.

[from a rear-perspective]

example: [gyro]----shaft----[gyro]

Yaw Left (counter-clockwise force):

[neutral]----shaft----/tilt/

Yaw Right (clockwise force):

\tilt\----shaft----[neutral]

Go Forward (clockwise & counterclockwise forces simultaneously):

/tilt/----shaft----\tilt\

The thing about precessionary forces is that they always occur perpendicular to the force exerted on them and are a rotating force, so it requires a 2nd gyro to act as a pivot or a counter-force to the other gyro.

Follow-up

I tried a search to see if anyone has done this before.

It's bunk. Full of people claiming "UFO technology" and "Anti-Gravity" and "Intertial Drive"

let me be the first to say that the above appears to be junk-science and not actually possible.

While one can turn themselves in a swiveling chair by spinning a large bicycle tire in their hands and tilting it clockwise and counter-clockwise (perpendicular to the spin of the wheel)

The precessionary forces that turn you in the chair cannot be redirected into spacial movements. The vectors completely cancel each other out when applied against another gyroscope.

...darn

Seemed neat in my head

Politician = whackjob

@ UDunnoBro

Mitt Romney = sycophantic corporate sellout and closeted religious nut

Newt Gingrich = unethical political hack and sycophantic religious douche

Rick Perry = relgious wackjob and corporate sellout

Michelle Bachman = relgious wackjob, wanna-be corporate sellout and beard to closeted husband

Rick Santorum = sycophantic religious wackjob

Sarah Palin = complete corporate sellout, sycophantic religious wackjob and wanna-be political hack

Ron Paul = pining for the days of the Robber-Barons corporate sellout and closeted religious/racist nut

...anyway, this would all be better displayed as a Venn Diagram LOL

Totally agree - but we're too busy with 'wars' to protect the interests of big oil... and the looming debt crisis... and 'entitlements'... sadly...

Now the private sector...

Let the Chinese go to the moon - They'll find out the hard way what we've known for decades, that it is extravagantly expensive, and there is nothing on the moon that is worth the high cost of bringing it back. So the Chinese will send men to the moon, they'll crow about it, then bring them back and quietly shelve the whole thing, and turn their attention back to making more cheap junk for Wal-Mart.

@JRS-619990

China will do it anyways and they are saying their moon base will be there within 15 years....that said, either we also lay claim to new territory (or be able to enforce current treaties) or we yield those rights and face the consequences.

Um, what "consequences" are you talking about? If you don't mind me asking.

Please be specific or stiffle yourself.

The main reason why the U.S. went to the moon was because we didn't want the Soviets to get there first. It seems like the only time this country unites to set ambitious yet achievable plans, is when we feel threatened or outdone by other countries. So I say to China (or Russia): "Go for the moon! Go for Mars!", because the United States won't do anything on that scale until it feels threatened by another country's progress.

@ CM-6969:

"Let the Chinese go to the moon - They'll find out the hard way what we've known for decades, that it is extravagantly expensive, and there is nothing on the moon that is worth the high cost of bringing it back."

Well, that's an argument for learning to do it cheaper, isn't it?

Or do you believe that spaceflight technology is now as economical as it'll ever get, to the end of time?

@ Alan Boyle

Thanks for the response. I am happy the MSNBC science writers take time to answer questions related to the article which only helps to build scientific understanding through education.

Given the argument that physicist Michio Kaku presents here, it might be wise to think about the future as he states that Fusion might be viable in 20 years which is about the same time we may need Helium-3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gRnezJNFro

So then the question becomes one familiar to both economists and environmentalists on the present day and future value of a common natural resource. While the idea may seem economically unfeasible in the short term, in the long term, it may be a wise choice to begin to develop the technologies so that in the future, the resource is available when needed.

Either way, it still is fun to dream about one day working on the moon and maybe, for some people alive today, that will be a reality.

Thanks for the discussion.

@ dubina

If you read the articles I posted, I am specifically referring to the theoretical argument that if mining were economically feasible, it would be in the United States best interest to have a presence on the moon. If only China did, then as the articles state, it may be harder to enforce current treaties given that someone now owns the commons (or has access to the gates of the commons). If you are wondering what I am referring to as commons, I am referring to a limited shared natural resource with access to everyone and the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons. Rather than me explain it, I'll just let Wikipedia do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

@ JRS-619990,

I am not convinced by your Tragedy of the Commons. Do you think China might claim the Moon and promulgate Customs to foreigners? Even though Americans were there in 1969? Absurd. Are you worried that China might find the only mother lode of Helium 3 on the Moon and prevent others from getting "their fair share"? Would you really go to the mat with China over this hypothetical resource on the moon when she already buys what she wants in South America and Africa?

This so-called Tragedy of the Commons is a flimsey excuse for bad behavior, something on the order of Manifest Destiny.

I would discount ideas about mining titanium or helium-3 on the moon for the next few decades, because the cost of transporting such materials back to Earth would probably make the venture uneconomic. The equation could change, however, if you're talking about mining materials for use on the moon, or producing supplies (such as fuel) for space operations. Or if someone builds a fusion reactor that really uses helium-3 as fuel.

How expensive would it be to fire a payload from the moon to earth's oceans for pickup? I can't imagine it would be too expensive once facilities are set up and running....

lol... reminds me of that movie.

Titanium and H3 on the moon=steps towards a shipbuilding yard for spacecraft.

Shuklack - Kinda what I was thinking... just build the disposable drop pods right there on the moon, fire em off via mass driver. But I agree that it would be a better idea just to use the material to build ships and structures on the moon instead of sending it back to Earth. Would really like to see some probes/rovers sent up to explore lunar lava tubes to see what conditions are like on the inside.

@ Brokinarrow

Yeah, the earth has plenty of titanium of its own. Now H3 on the other hand, that stuff is non-existent outside of a particle accelerator or a nuclear blast.

It would be fascinating for lunar mines to send back H3 to earth. The stuff is so buoyant that the drop-pods could probably function like dirigibles once in the lower atmosphere.

Oh the humanity!

They're not going to do that because there is no way to make money on it - it is far too expensive, and far too little return. It is far more likely that they'd fund basic scientific research that would lead to the same kinds of "technological boosts", but at a far lower cost than funding manned spaceflights.

I thought they looked more like space-crabs to me.

What about the whalers on the moon?

lol!

@sic141w

Would be interesting to be able to look forward to the day when we do make first contact, and see how world politics react to that.

First contact tantamount to the monkey that might fly out of my butt.

Dream on, but you pay for your fantasy, not me.

There are up to 300 sextillion (that's 100 billion times 3 trillion) stars in the known Universe. Many of them host planetary systems. Many of the stars that host such planetary systems have the potential to support habitable planets, and, therefore, extraterrestrial life.

The concept of "contact" with an alien civilization is not far-fetched. Many practical, well-educated, intelligent people believe that we will at some point find evidence of alien civilizations, likely through an effort to contact us, or traces of their technology beyond our solar system.

I think that dubina is simply waiting to be pleasantly surprised.

But from the standpoint of probability and the existence of extremophiles on earth, the likelihood that life exists in the universe is very high, and the likelihood that it exists elsewhere in our solar system is also entirely probable.

Now the chances of running into life as intelligent as we are, that is probably quite a bit more rare.

Considering that US Foreign Aid to just one country can run in the billions each year (for example, the US gives $1.3 Billion per year to Egypt's military which is currently being reconsidered by lawmakers), if a new president should decide to reinvest even some of that foreign aid money elsewhere with a more promising return, there may be a possible source of funding to at least get started and the beginning stages of a moon project off the ground.

@ Alan Boyle,

I know you are a tech writer, that part of your game is to make otherwise unimaginable things seem plausible. I know what that entails, and I know it has a place in our culture. One of my concerns is that tech writers are prone to confirmation bias; they are more inclined to construct the future than debunk it. That is understandable; I can't imagine someone debunking a far-fetched idea before someone else had touted it as a possibility.

Yes, you did acknowledge in the item that folks may well decide that it's not worth returning to the moon, for $40 billion, $104 billion or maybe even $4 billion.

You might have said as much for the so-called 100-Year Starship Study.

The 100-Year Starship Study is a project seeded by DARPA and NASA Ames to develop a sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel viable.

Don't look now, but someone is selling 100-year Starship wine before its time.

I see that you are more a herald and an advocate than a skeptic. I understand that, and I see that you have a good market for your ideas. I see lots of people who are forward thinkers, even more who are wishful thinkers and hopeless romantics. Gingrich would have an American base on the Moon by 2020? Nonsense. How can he possibly say that? Where is his business plan? I think he doesn't have a business plan. If he did have a business plan...something to justify the massive expenditure of public and private funds, it would either be based on unrealistic assumptions or, as you said, some jingoistic notion of Empire Building. How could he pledge to build a moon base in eight years or less (in order to claim the Moon for Helium 3 mining when no fusion reactor exists that uses Helium 3 and no fusion reactor of that sort will likely exist for years beyond 2020, if ever. In fact, Newt's pledge is nonsense; he is pandering to a population of foolish, ignorant people.

Personally, I find Newt's pandering or his lack of technical acumen (or both) deplorable and offensive.

Dubina - And I would fire you for lack of vision and creativity. As I've pointed out in the past, the biggest issue we as a species will be facing in the future is that of overpopulation. Possibilities for dealing with that issue: 1. Population control - Most free nations, and especially the USA, would sooner overthrow their governments than be told how many children they can and can't have. 2 - World War III - this would likely kill off a large amount of the population, but is really only a temporary "solution" as we would repopulate. 3 - We spend a small percentage of our national budget (say 3%) and kick start research into space flight and get off this rock.

@ Brokinarrow

Overpopulation really shouldn't be the reason to leave this rock. Being able to collect resources and bring them back to earth would allow us to work more optimally because we would no longer depend exclusively on the finite resources available on earth, but now, around the solar system as well. Think of it like an extended trade supply chain similar to how today, we buy rare-earths from China/India, mine coal from the US, extract petroleum from Canada and Mexico, etc etc etc.

Collecting resources from space would reduce the strain on the ones we have on earth.

Another reason to being able to populate around the cosmos is the threat of extinction from cataclysmic events. It would not take much to wipe out most/all of the human race, and either put us back into the stone age or kill us off completely. If we can diversify ourselves and have a sufficiently large presence away from earth, we reduce the likelihood that a single cataclysmic event kills us all...heck, we might even find a way to prevent it.

Lastly, regarding over-population itself. Aside from the occasional anomaly, the more educated people get, the fewer children on average that they tend to have. It's the uneducated masses in 3rd world countries that pop out more kids than they know what to do with.

The best way to bring this population growth under control is to figure out a means of improving the economies in these regions so that these people can have productive jobs. Not only will it benefit everyone else that they contribute to the global economy, but that they also stop being a haven for disease and over-population.

I'e said it here a million times, I foresee a time where we live on a park-like planet, and get our resources from the rest of the solar system. as KIRK said in that movie, "Actually, I'm from Iowa, I just WORK in outer space"!!!!

Seriously - Yup, LOTS of reasons to further the cause of space exploration and development.

Stephen - To go another direction with that, in Star Wars, Corellia (Han Solo's home planet) is pretty much exactly as you described - a beautiful park like planet, land being used mostly for agriculture and living space. All of Corellia's factories are orbital, thus saving the planet itself from any pollution.

"...the shuttles were good for what they were, orbiters, but as for exploration, they weren't at all suitable for that, hauling cargo into LEO was the only thing they really excelled at, deploying space station modules and satellites."

Yes. No surprise there, that's precisely what they were meant to do. They were an attempt at reuseable launch vehicles, not reuseable interplanetary vehicles. That we didn't also use them for orbital assembly of deep-space craft is not the fault of the Shuttles themselves (and there were proposals).

And that's how existing launchers, and any next-generation RLV should also be used. Launchers that can serve many government and commercial interests, not sinking our money into a heavy-lift launcher that NASA didn't ask for, and would be the only (infrequent) user of, getting no real manufacturing economies of scale by spreading its use across a wider customer base...or maintaining launch support proficiency because it might be launched 1-2 times yearly.

(And even as HLVs go, SLS is not designed for economy, but to maintain jobs in certain states/districts. Better configurations are possible.)

This where Bolden has hinted that Nasa may not even use the SLS, he said future Nasa mission should use the cheapest off the shelf technologies available as much as possible.

It going to be difficult to justify using the SLS when their is the Falcon Heavy capable of doing the same job at a fraction of the suppose price of the SLS. When it comes to nasa to decide what to use that when the SLS will be expose as nothing but a jobs programme and a very expensive one at that. MCPV can be launch on any number of current and future launchers, as will be proven by Nasa when it is launch by one of the alternatives as part its testing programme as the SLS will not be read in time for the tests on the capsule.

Falcon 9 heavy wont come anywhere near the fully developed SLS's 130 metric tons to LEO capacity. Also, you have to understand, that with a smaller launcher, the diameter of the cargo that can be hauled into space will be smaller, which severely limits it's capability. I like SpaceX, but they can't do what NASA should do, deep space missions, that's just not a possiblility as it stands today, and won't be for a long time, the falcon 9 heavy is really puny compared to a real HLV.

As it stand now the Falcon Heavy and SLS can both carry the same diameter cargo.

The real SLS will requires that Nasa make continue major upgrades to the SLS launch vehicle over a decade. Something which it has never done before

Also if you take current quoted price of the Falcon Heavy it will be substantial cheaper than the SLS, giving you about 5 launches compare to one SLS once the SLS platform past is first three launches. The first launch is expected to cost 3 billion dollars, you could get 15 Falcon Heavies for that one SLS launch, even the lower price quoted for the SLS and the highest I seen for the FH you would get 4 launches of the Falcon Heavy for every launch of the SLS.

The craft simply not viable and far to expensive. Which is the point this article is trying to make, everything that the SLS is design to do can be done with smaller vehicles and at a far cheaper price.

And while major work isn't being done on the design (because there's no sufficient user requirement for a commercial HLV at this time) right now, there is the proposed Falcon XX.

Heavy lift (140 tons), the 10 meter diameter you want, a development cost estimated at $2 billion USD, no SRBs. As I said, if there's a real need for HLV,, SLS is a very cost-ineffective way to go about it.

Not enough? Then resurrect Aerojet's Sea Dragon...

Totally.

And I think we'd learn a lot on the way that would help us in space.

Only problem with the moon is moon dust. That crap sounds like it will be very hard to work with (gets on and into everything). Not sure if there is a work around.

Oh? Who funded Christopher Columbus again?

Why shouldn't it be the realm of governments? Exploration doesn't usually have a near-term profit, but the results have had tremendous benefits.

Evidently, you are unaware of the many places that humans currently colonize that are also considered inhospitable to human life without some protective structure...such as in the ocean (ocean laboratories), stations at Antarctica, and even that "space" between the Earth and the Moon known as the International Space Station that orbits the Earth. That is considered colonizing. No one said anything about running around outside on the moon without a space suit...that would be like trying to get a tan outside in Antarctica dressed in only a bathing suit, I wouldn't recommend it.

(Also, currently, taxpayers fund our bases at Antarctica even though it is for scientific purposes.)

Here's a link to get your started:

http://www.coolantarctica.com/Bases/modern_antarctic_bases3.htm

Exactly we need to developed a cheap, affordable way to get into LEO. Then work on getting cheap and affordable ways on getting to and from the Moon and Mars so that trips to and from those places become regular and not one off or years between each trip.

This requires a fully reusable infrastructure at every stage, not stuff like Altair which was design so that it would need rebuilding/replacing every mission.

Most of this is already being developed by private space firms and are at different stages or by other nations.

Will American pride get in the way of cooperating with other nations.

Cant, there are Moon spiders......

Can you include a section in the article that discusses what manufacturing processes might be improved in a low gravity (1/6th that of Earth's) environment? And would mining be easier in this environment or how exactly would that work?