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Investing in space travel?

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As a forward I am biased as I used to work supporting a NASA facility, however with that said I am a huge supporter of spending on space exploration R&D....granted there are always other issues on the table that could take precedence, the reality is that if we don't invest the money and resources now into furthering our technical capability the longer it will take for us to make any real progress.
 
Mars maybe someday, the moon, never. Lack of an atmosphere makes it too difficult to protect any type of base, including an underground one, from meteors that strike it regularly. It's surface is pockmarked with craters for a reason.
 
We?ve already printed $5 trillion, you want us to double up on our expenditures this year? It?s too late to spend that money elsewhere, the line is cast, the seeds are sown. All that comes now is reaping the success or utter failure of our $5 trillion investment.

If you ever wanted to socialize losses and ensure everyone fails/goes bankrupt I could think of no better way than what we have done. All our eggs are in one basket now.
 
Originally posted by: piasabird
I think investing in space has a better chance of a return than this bailout.
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With the US taxpayer investing in the "bailout", we are giving a select few the best opportunity to concentrate the maximum amount of wealth possible for them. Seems like a great return. Invest a negative amount of wealth and get a positive amount back. Or was you talking about the average person getting ass-raped and pretty much watching the point of no return into indentured servitude?
 
I'd rather the government "promise" "up to $7.5 T" to spend the money on NASA and space/science. We get benefits as a society from that, but not so much from wars or throwing money to save bad business practices.
 
I'm all for more money to NASA, but human exploration? Why? Why send humans to space?

edit: and more money on science in general.
 
Originally posted by: Andrew1990
I was thinking, instead of doing this entire bailout thing that really only helps the heads of these corporations, why not invest that money into space travel?

It was estimated that it would cost 1 trillion dollars to start a base on the moon. That is something like 1/3rd of what we are spending on the bailout. With the moon base, it will creat quite a few jobs in my opinion with building and testing. It will also allow us to get a stepping stone out in space where we can launch exploration vehicles to mars and such much easier.

I know that in the beginning it would probably not bring much to the table, but in the long run it might be a great success to human kind.

I rather have our governments spend money on that then to spend money bailing out companies who dont even know how to run right.
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If you make the present congress astronauts, then I'm in.
I'm thinking Jupiter and beyond here.
 
Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Originally posted by: Oceandevi
Asteroid mining, Or NEO since the belt is pretty damn far. Robotic mining of a metal rich NEO could be very profitable. Where do you mine it though? How do you get the goods planetside? questions..
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A very good reason to build a space elevator. I assume that one would be needed for operations such as this one on a large scale.
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It is the most feasible idea so far, if daunting. A majority of our presence in space should be robotic for some time though. Soooo much cheaper.
 
Look at it this way guys. On our planet there are resources. They are dust compared to the riches in our solar system.

Imagine a huge forest. Now watch the ants who live in the empty coke can under a rock, afraid to venture out.... sad eh?
 
I don't think we're at the stage of technology to efficiently move into space. What we need is to keep investing in science and tech research, so that we can be ready sooner.
 
I wish. While China and Japan expand their space agencies, American's are too busy demanding government handouts or trampling each other for worthless consumer goods. I feel we've lost that independent forward thinking spirit we've once had, one that believed in the importance of an idea. Apparently having a vision for the future is considered worthless.
 
Originally posted by: eilute
Originally posted by: Andrew1990
Excuse me for not knowing, but what is a space elevator?
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It's an elevator that goes up into space. It's technologically infeasible.
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It has been shown that it is feasible, but we do not have the technology to mass produce carbon nanotubes yet.
it would have to be currently made of other super strong tensile products making it very heavy and thick, thus economically not feasible.

If we had the investment to perfect the nanotubes (which have already been created in labs) we would be set.

But we do have the tech to do it now. Just not efficiently.
 
Only if we can send the people responsible for the current economy to the moon to form a colony. They would fit right in with $100K tool kits.
 
Originally posted by: Skoorb
Great use of money. Maybe next we can make a floating palace that sits on a bed of massive turbine engines, their fuel continually replenished by a huge fleet of refueling jets that toil day and night to ensure the palace's majesty can stay aloft until the end of time.
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I laughed so hard, I had to wipe away the tears.

 
Moon base/mines + Orbital Ship Yard = cheap space vehicles that don't need materials from the Earth's Surface. It'd be a hell of a huge initial investment, but in the long run it'd be worth it IMO. You never know what's there until you look. We could discover anything that could help in ways we can't even imagine.

Science makes the big breakthroughs, Engineering refines/finds the applications for the breakthroughs, but can only take us so far. Everyone seems to be too stuck on Engineering and guaranteed return. Without pure theoretical science that initially had no foreseeable practicality we wouldn't have shit. Thankfully we have a few organizations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Planetary Society that think otherwise.

For the curious, The Planetary Society provided most of the funding to start SETI@home, a project with a pretty laughable goal by practical standards; but who's development proved the concept of distributed computing that is now used by literally hundreds of projects with far more "practical" goals.
http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
http://distributedcomputing.info/upcoming.html
http://www.planetary.org/progr...tiathome_20070706.html
 
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