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Quote by: Zeebadee  Yet getting usable amounts of any "loads" of lunar material back to earth will be difficult and expensive. Re-entry problems will only multiply when the mass of a vehicle is increased. |
The answers to that issue were developed over 30 years ago by a man named
Gerard K. O'Neill. There is no reason to return teh mass to Earth when the best place to put a civilization is in
space. As a formerly very active member of the L5 Society I strongly support the ideas of colonization of space. However, following the merger with the National Space Institute, to form the
National Space Society, the grassroots activism in the L5 Society was effectively destroyed, which ended my involvement in space activism.
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Quote by: Zeebadee Sure, a breeze. Fusion power alone isn't going to make "the planets will be very much easier to reach" a viable statement. Also, "cheap & basically unlimited amounts of energy" on the moon isn't going to be much good for those of us on the earth. |
However, by taking the resources of the moon and building
solar power satellites we could solve most all of the world's issues with resource depletion and Global Warming (tm). But, we may have missed the window for resolving such issues in such a manner. In the late '70s and early '80s, almost anything was possible. However, with the governmental interference, and the "not invented here" attitude of NASA, we may have missed the opportunity.
In the Pikes Peak L5 Society, in the mid '80s, when NASA and the DOD was working on developing the
National Aero-Space Plane, we used to joke (but not really so funny) about the direction NASA was headed.
In the 1960's, we went to the moon. In the 1970's, the Shuttle would carry a payload to 400 miles above the Earth's surface. (ok, the shuttle didn't fly in the '70s, but that was the providence of the technology) In the 1980's, the NASP was intended to fly to an altitude of 200 miles. The direction NASA was headed, by the end of the century, we would have been driving ox carts.
Well, the NASP never came to be. The ISS is in an orbit of around 200 miles. We're running out of fuel. It won't be long before our government has us in ox carts.
Keith