Would the corporation that established the moon base(and helium 3 mine) also have exclusive rights to said helium 3?
Which we’ll use to fuel our flying cars, undoubtedly. 
I wonder if the Outer Space Treaty would preclude such exclusive rights.
Is is TEHNICALLY possible? Well, sure. The technology exists.
Economically? Oh, what a laugh. Look at the federal budget and tell me where the money’s coming from.
[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
Would the corporation that established the moon base(and helium 3 mine) also have exclusive rights to said helium 3?
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If a corporation could actually do this, let ‘em have it. If they can get valuable resources off the frickin’ MOON for a profit I say let them be richer than Apple. They’d deserve every penny.
Phase one is to close medicare and social security. Then render the corpses that litter the streets every day into an energy-rich waxy fuel for the rockets. It’s quite cost-efficient.
Would it matter if we gave the $10,000,000,000 bounty to a corporation that wasn’t strictly American?
I think the moon would make a great prison*. No worry about escapes. An additional bonus is that prisoners who eventually did make it back to earth would be physically handicapped and not likely to commit heinous physical attacks against the populous. Another plus is that we could send poor children and orphans there and because of the lower gravity they could do heavy lifting and manual labor normally done by adults at a lower wage, say 30 kids for every 1 adult. And the best bonus is that the children would have a lower food and oxygen burden on the colony. This is such a win/win situation I’m surprised someone hasn’t thought of it before.
*or harsh mistress as the case may be.
I’d agree that on Gingrich’s part, it’s not much of a promise and that anyone who thinks it means anything is being fooled. But, realistically speaking, if establishing a lunar base can’t be done in 8 years for $10 billion, it isn’t worth doing.
It costs 450 million to put the shuttle in orbit. Transporting materials, tools and people all the way to the moon would be far more per flight.
I don’t think 10 billion would be enough to build an outhouse.
I suppose if you could throw enough money at it you COULD establish such a base by 2020, but, AFAIK NASA is in no position to do so. From memory, I think that they canceled their ‘new’ Apollo like orbiter project, so they would have to restart that…and, assuming my memory isn’t flawed here (always a bad assumption), that would require boatloads of cash to crash restart it and get it up and tested in that time frame. It would take billions…lots of them. And I’m not seeing the public being ready to foot the bill for it right now.
Quite a bit, IMHO. There is still tons to learn about the Moon, including how to actually live there for longer periods of time than 3 days. A research station on the Moon would allow for stuff ranging from the potential for more powerful telescopes, to learning more about the composition and distribution of the Moon, to definitively answering the water question to engineering and learning how to keep people alive in such environments. And this leaves aside potential commercial opportunities, or the fact that we could use the Moon as a springboard to Mars (assuming you think it’s worthwhile to go there as well, of course), as well as other places in our solar system.
Whether all of this stuff is worth the price tag is debatable (I think it is, though I don’t think it’s politically possible), but there would be a point to going there and establishing such a base for scientific discovery.
-XT
The Constellation program was, indeed, cancelled in early 2010. However, the new Space Launch Systemis now NASA’s proposed solution. It looks like it’ll still use the same crew capsule (Orion spacecraft) which NASA had been developing as part of Constellation.
Cool…thanks for the links! I didn’t know they had moved on. I seemed to recall that Obama wanted to hold off on further manned efforts to consolidate NASA and move towards potential future technologies.
-XT
The $10 billion bounty is a miniscule fraction of what it’d cost the government, but to be honest I wasn’t thinking about the bounty. If it’s a profitable enterprise, let a corporation do it themselves.
Fuck no, there won’t be a moon base by then. Our politicians are all small-minded, short sighted hacks. The days of John F. Kennedy, the greatest president of the 20th century for his singular achievement of declaring that America will go to the moon, and then doing it, are over, dead, as dead as Kennedy is. America’s space program has been castrated, and I don’t see any effort to revive it. Kids aren’t interested in being astronauts or scientists; they’d rather be Kim Kardashian and Edward Cullen. It’s funny, we thought that the internet would make America smarter, and it’s done the exact opposite. For all the massive information it’s made available to people, it’s still mostly utilized for the stupidest possible reasons.
America lacks the national ideological climate necessary for space exploration.
What, that of Starship Troopers?
I’m not sure we’ve advanced all that much in propulsion technology. We certainly understand how to spend a long time in space now. But remember, Apollo consisted of a quite small LEM and a smaller return vehicle. To build a moon base we’d need a truck with a lot more capacity than the shuttle.
As an engineer, Newt is a bad history professor. And the idea that a company would do it for a $10 billion prize is of the same mindset that thinks cutting taxes on a company will get them to hire people when there is no market for their products.
As for the government doing it, that is going to be tough when Republicans won’t raise taxes for the military.
I’d like nothing better to see a moonbase - but maybe Mitt should start calling Newt Speaker Moonbeam.
Lemming-like impatience. If and when the right time comes to expand to the Moon, Mars and beyond it will be because DARPA or someone else comes up with a way to do it easier, not because of the people wanting to do it right now with 1940s era technology.
What about this?
1: Genetically engineer a giant psychic squid monster.
2: Teleport it into a dense population center.
3: Scare the world into investing in space ships.
Lets make America great again!
That’s like offering a lollipop to the first private company to find a solution for world hunger.
As an aside, I’d rather not have a for-profit private enterprise having anything whatsoever to do with the Moon. Next thing you know it’d be covered in neon billboards.
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I think the moon would make a great prison*. No worry about escapes. An additional bonus is that prisoners who eventually did make it back to earth would be physically handicapped and not likely to commit heinous physical attacks against the populous. Another plus is that we could send poor children and orphans there and because of the lower gravity they could do heavy lifting and manual labor normally done by adults at a lower wage, say 30 kids for every 1 adult. And the best bonus is that the children would have a lower food and oxygen burden on the colony. This is such a win/win situation I’m surprised someone hasn’t thought of it before.
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Someone has. They called it “Australia”.