Outa the way NASA. Here comes the Air Force - Space Plane

This is way too short sighted. The moon is the prefect place to put all our dirty industries. The moon is dead, it has no life, no ecosystem for us to destroy. We shouldn't be ripping the tops off mountains on Earth destroying the fragile ecosystems in the area, we should be mining the moon instead. We don't need to be polluting the rivers with industrial chemical waste on Earth, we can (thinking 100+ years out) move all our polluting industries out into space. The moon being the closest rock to this planet is the perfect place. It is only 3 days away, and we could be controlling robotic factories using the same technologies used in the drones, and Mars Rover right now.

Before switching to software, I use to work in a fab making computer chips. Most of the steps -metal deposition, ion implantation, annealing- in making a computer chip involved a vacuum. A lot of effort is made pumping down, cleaning, and repairing vacuum chambers. Getting the chambers down to a vacuum state is very difficult on the Earth. In many ways the vacuum of space is a more natural place to be building computer chips. We also don't need to be pollution the planet with the waste products of this process either.

Money spent getting to the moon is not wasted, it is a long-term investment. It is where we should be headed in the natural course of our societies evolution. Many people just cannot think beyond the next few days/months/years to see the benefits however.

This is a very good book that details all the industrial processes that can take place on the moon. It's not cool, but a good read for someone that is technically minded.

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Lunar-Base-Handbook-Space-Technology/dp/0072401710"]Amazon.com: The Lunar Base Handbook (Space Technology Series) (9780072401714): Peter Eckart: Books[/ame]


Mining the Sky is also good though less technical.

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp/0201328194/ref=pd_sim_b_6"]Amazon.com: Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets (Helix Book) (9780201328196): John S. Lewis: Books[/ame]

 

Exactly. What the heck are we doing dicking around in space when we have real issues here?

 

And it's really really far away. Transportation costs would be a killer. We're already starting to see a shift from producing in China to producing in America because the costs of shipping are high enough that the costs of labor and regulations don't matter so much - and that's after a tripling of costs. Who is going to produce in space when costs of shipping are hundreds of thousands of times more? Proponents of the space station were saying that microgravity would be a great place to produce expensive, low weight things like electronics or medicine. No one took them up on their offer. They problems they had that space was supposed to solve were overcome here on Earth for far, far less. You vacuum problem? Sure, space provides the vacuum. But it doesn't provide anything else, and it supplies lots of bad stuff, like radiation. There is nothing that becomes more elegant or simpler in space.

And what's dirty? Oil production? Coal production? They don't have oil or coal in space. You can't export those industries. And you know what else is dirty and uses lots of energy? Launching spacecraft.

If real costs in space are going to be cheaper and the opportunities better, then business will go to space themselves. It's stupid to do something that is really expensive that no business wants under a misguided belief that it will help them.

It's wasted because the technology we use now would not be the technology needed for a hypothetical base that would benefit us in energy or manufacturing, just as the technology of Apollo was left to rot and wouldn't be used to go to the Moon now. Wait and see if the technology and the world energy situation gets to a place where such a thing is possible. If.

 

Growing up in Houston it is a pretty well understood fact by local thinkers, tinkers and social drinkers that our U.S. military (and the part of our military that our government doesn't want us knowing gets funded) we understand
these military lifers have had NASA and its budget on lock since the first Nazi 262 fired up in the 40's.
Space as some grand final frontier was Cold War motivated and Cold War marketed.
Now, Fed money to go to space is fluff to anyone's budget.

Exactly fellow footy junkies.
The Chinese specifically have been saying this to anyone with some sense since like 1975.

Then there is the nasty side effect of calcium loss from living in Zero G for years.

 

I guess I'm not seeing your point. A large percentage of US Space launches have always been military and the military has always been secretive about them.