My God, Anne, Americans are worried about losing their homes, their jobs and their healthcare, not ‘cislunar space.’ Is everybody in the Beltway trhis disconnected from the realities of life in the United States today? Good Lord.

“For some reason, you think that NASA’s budget is somehow crippling the American economy.”

No, I think that the amount of money you want spent on your Moon plans would exceed the amount of money that NASA currently gets.

“studies continue to show that our investment in space has created a lot more wealth than its consumed”

Old studies. Gone are the days where space technology lead the way for transferable technology. Look around you today, and try and identify a product or service that was created by direct technology spin-offs from the last 20 years. What is driving innovation today is consumer demand, both in technology and biotechnology, and no significant part of it is from the space program.

“Lunar hydrogen and oxygen could reduce the cost of placing satellites into geosynchronous orbit.”

So could a new generation of low-cost launchers (Falcon 9 being one of them).

The difference is that for lunar supplies to become an economic alternative, hundreds of billions of dollars have to be expended first over a period of decades (infrastructure creation, transportation, logistics, crew facilities, etc., etc.). The payoff would not come for generations.

It takes a long time to go from resource discovery to profitability in a harsh environment – and throw in the complications of 1/6 gravity and an airless environment, plus a logistics supply line 238,857 miles long. Oh, and there is no market demand for resources on the Moon at this time.

For some reason, you think that NASA’s budget is somehow crippling the American economy. NASA expenditures represent less than 0.6% of total Federal expenditures. And studies continue to show that our investment in space has created a lot more wealth than its consumed. And its certainly created more technological advancement.

Lunar hydrogen and oxygen could reduce the cost of placing satellites into geosynchronous orbit. Satellites, of course, are at the core of a $100 billion a year world wide telecommunications industry.

Lunar water and hydrogen and oxygen could also dramatically reduce the cost related to space tourism– especially to the Moon. Polls have shown that 7% of those wealthy enough to travel into space would actually pay $20 million do so. That’s about 7000 people world wide. If just 10% of that number traveled into space every year, that would represent $14 billion in annual revenues. Terrestrial tourism, by the way, is nearly a trillion dollar a year global industry.

Lunar hydrogen and oxygen could someday help to reduce the cost of deploying solar power satellites into geosynchronous orbit.

The ISS program cost the US about $2 billion a year. If you include the shuttle flights then I guess you could argue that it cost about $5 billion a year (about 2 weeks occupying Iraq). Air, water, food, and oxygen, of course, have to be shipped from the Earth’s immense gravity well.

A Moon base, however, could provide its own air and water extracted from the lunar regolith. And now that we know that there are also carbon and nitrogen resources at the lunar poles, we should be able to grow food at lunar facilities also.

The fact that you continue to perpetuate the idea that NASA’s relatively tiny budget is somehow hurting the US economy is the ultimate fantasy. Our investment in space has made this country richer! And our long term investment in the natural resources of the solar system will make us even richer!

“Yes, that is what we are talking about”

I can see that you and Marcel should hook up, and be the lead investors in Moon Inc. I’m sure you’ll make a killing, since you’ll have first-mover advantage – unless you run out of money before the market develops.

Let us know if you succeed…

“Not really. There is no need for the water on the Moon today – we have plenty here on Earth. Water on the Moon only becomes important when we need water somewhere near the Moon (on the ground, in orbit nearby, etc.).”

Yes, that is what we are talking about- “needing water somewhere near the Moon”

You regulars are just plain ridiculous sometimes. Do you understand at all what a completely stupid statement you just made?

Yes, there are a lot. But to a Moon-cultist, especially one who gets his information from thirty year old treatises, reasons don’t mean much.

But … but … oh wow, with all the resources we could mine on the Moon, we could build a huge telescope!! Imagine how cheap steel, glass, and aluminum would be on the Moon!! I can do an assay of lunar soil and find precisely those constituents!! Just laying there on the ground!! I don’t have to carry them from Earth!! I just have to carry a refinery, but, hey …

They don’t call ‘em lunatics for nothing.

“Being too lazy to invest in lunar resources will not make this country richer.”

How much of your life savings have you invested in a Moon venture? If they answer is less than 50%, then you are a hypocrite.

And why would anyone invest in an enterprise that has no customers? You may not know this, but investors want to see a return on their investment, and the vast majority of them only invest when they see the risk is worth the reward. No one has put forth a credible business plan that shows an ROI for lunar investment. No one.

The ratio of people seeking investment versus those that actually get them is close to 1,000 to 1, so investors don’t have a shortage of places to invest their money. The Moon has to become compelling before anyone puts significant money into it, and so far it hasn’t been. And yes, that may be a chicken-and-egg situation, but that happens with many emerging markets, so don’t feel special.

“We’d be a much richer nation today if we had invested in a Moon base back in the 1980s”

Richer in what way? What does the Moon have that we can’t get less expensively on Earth?

I don’t think you understand how much money it takes to do anything in space. The ISS has been very educational, and should tell you how hard it would be to just keep 3 (much less 6) people in LEO. Supporting that number of people on the Moon would have broken the bank before the first inhabitants finished their first deployment.

You’re living in a fantasy world my friend. No one has the money you need for your Moon dreams.

“Wrong. There is no advantage due to lunar gravity in intercepting vehicle transiting cislunar space.

Your backup idea is nonsense also. Spacecraft on earth can also be stored undergound to protect them from EMP.

An EMP device could be sent to the moon within hours, see Pluto New Horizons.

Glad you are not a military strategist or an engineer.”

You do realize that a major EMP attack would knock out more than just all of our satellites in Earth orbit as far as GEO? The pulse would also knock out most of the electricity in the US, disabling our electrical infrastructure for several weeks if not several months.

Trying to quickly launch back up satellites from Earth to LEO and GEO under such conditions would be extremely difficult.

On the Moon, however, reusable vehicles could easily launch such back up satellites from the lunar surface. And, of course, the delta v requirements to launch a satellite from the Moon to GEO or LEO are substantially less than launching such devices from the Earth’s surface.

And the lunar base itself will serve as a limited back up telecommunications satellite until the replacement satellites from the Moon are deployed.

Lunar shuttles operating from the Moon to L1 combined with cis-lunar shuttles operating from L1 to Earth orbit could also rescue people trapped in EMP disabled space stations in Earth orbit (astronauts, scientist, and space tourist) and shuttle them safely to lunar bases.

So far, you’re loosing the space wars very badly:-)

Two more reasons that the moon is a bad place for optical astronomy:

First, putting a telescope next to a planetary body blots out half of the sky at any given time.

Second, the moon is dusty, which would wreck havoc with the optics. Look at how dusty the Apollo EVA suits became. Servicing the telsecopes or even siteing them near a maned base would be a nightmare.

A lagrange point telescope can access almost the entire sky all of the time and the space enviroment in much more benign.

Being too lazy to invest in lunar resources will not make this country richer. It will make us poorer and possibly dependent on other nations for extraterrestrial fuel resources for our space vehicles and fuel depots in the future.

We’d be a much richer nation today if we had invested in a Moon base back in the 1980s instead of investing hundreds of billions of dollars going around in circles above the Earth for the last 40 years. And we’d probably already be on Mars thanks to that lunar base.