See the last sentence in the first paragraph of the wiki article you linked there. Possibly the most promising technology we will ever have to take us to the stars killed by a bunch of Chicken Littles. I was watching some of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos videos the other day. In one of them, Sagan mention’s Project Orion and it’s cancellation. I swear he rolled his eyes!
The Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. See how Marvin likes it.
Then, I’d really try get terra-forming a huge push.
Europa is on my list, as well as Ceres. Apparently it might have water on it, too. I would seed it with a healthy dose of sturdy bacteria and see what grows.
Spend the money scanning the skies for the comet/asteroid that has our name on it, and on a way to shoot it down/deflect it before it gets here.
The Voyager probes were actually (comparatively) dirt cheap versions of the proposed Grand Tour mission that Congress rejected due to cost.
The plan that you propose has a number of fatal flaws in it. First, there is a relatively fixed cost and level of effort associated with launch operations. Launching 15 vehicles in a day would vastly overtax the infrastructure of all existing government and commercial launch facilities combined. Even assuming that the infrastructure is expanded, there is just no way you are going to test, integrate, stack, and launch 15 expendable vehicles a day with anything like conventional technology. It takes months of effort just to integrate and launch a single suborbital vehicle, and while part of this can be attributed to the waste of redoing some work over again, much of it is just effort that has to be done to assure reasonable launch success rates and mitigate hazards.
Talking about hazards, performing multiple launches a day is inevitably going to result in stuff falling out of the sky, and occasionally, onto the head of some unlucky sailor or farmer, as it is impossible to fly a trajectory that doesn’t overfly any areas however sparsely populated. To date we’ve been really lucky (aside from explosions on pad) that no piece of launch debris has ever killed a bystander, but launching anything like 15 vehicles a day would push the probability toward statistical certainty. Once this happens you can bet that the cost to resolve the liability will be enormous, and will put a crimp in further launch efforts.
Then there is the plan to build the probes as “cheap and plentiful…some shielding, a power source, a pentium chip, a radio, an antenna.” This belies a lack of understanding of what goes into making conventional probes capable (and but barely) of performing their duties and communicating with ground control. The radiation environment of interplanetary space, outside of the protective blanket of Earth’s magnetosphere, is highly destructive, and it takes hardened and qualified electronics to perform reliably. Any probe that is going to go out to the asteroid belt or further can’t use solar radiation for power; instead, it will use radioisotope thermoelectric generators or fission reactors and the costs associated with them (i.e. the expensive and labor-intensive fuel production cycle).
Communication with a probe that is beyond Low Earth Orbit is actually quite complicated and requires considerable sophistication. You aren’t just going to plug a ham radio into the satellite bus and be about to send information back and forth. [POST=11579277]Here[/POST] is a post that describes the system used for Apollo, and this was just at lunar distance. Communications facilities and bandwidth are another fixed resource that would be vastly overtaxed by the number of missions you suggest.
As for using the general public and volunteer ‘scientists’ and mission controllers, it is almost to the point of offensiveness that you assume that the work done by highly trained and specialized scientists and engineers could be performed by dilettantes and hobbyists. One would not suggest that a hospital could be run by random people who come in volunteering to be surgeons, internists, and anesthesiologists; why would you assume that space missions could be planned and conducted by people who don’t have the decades of training in mission planning, trajectory analysis, and planetology that professionals have?
That isn’t to say that there isn’t benefit in economies of scale and the reuse off technologies between missions, and in fact that is one of the focuses of current space probes. Search on the NASA Modular Common Spacecraft Bus. Actually, reuse and adaptation of hardware has long been a NASA policy; witness the NASA Standard Initiator (NSI), a pyrotechnic initiator that is mandated for use on all NASA spacecraft and pyro-initiated devices. Reuse is key, not only to controlling costs but assuring reliability. However, you can’t just make things infinitely cheap by making more of them; once you have amortized the tooling and facilities for production and testing, the price becomes a fixed cost per unit, and ordering more doesn’t make them cheaper.
We may one day be able to launch semi-autonomous, self-repairing, general purpose probes by the hundreds, scatter them to the winds, and let them report back piecemeal, but not with anything like conventional spacecraft technology. What you describe goes beyond any reasonable extrapolation of current capability.
Stranger
A 1920’s style Death Ray.
OK maybe an honest to god space factory. Manufacturing little things like purer drugs, alloys, and machine parts.
An enormous radio telescope on the far side of the moon. Of course we’d need a moon base as well, so let’s get a moon base going too!
I vaguely remember talk about a big giant magnet thingy that could launch payloads into space. What the heck happened to that?
It was like a train track on a ramp, when the shuttle or whatever got to the end it would have enough momentum to go into orbit.
I’m a gov’t contractor myself, and it’s a certainty that the government contracting “big projects” model is loaded with incentives to drive up costs to the government. It is almost to the point of offensiveness that you assume that the work done by highly trained and specialized contract-inflating managers doesn’t drive up costs beyond what straightforward engineering would.
Seriously, amateur astronomers have made many contributions, and I was really talking about using rank amateurs AND the same highly trained pool of scientists, just without paying them inflated contract rates. I’m constantly being asked to volunteer time and expertise, donate money, and work unpaid time; why can’t NASA get some of that good old free labor for space exploration? I mean, the problem is that the current model is essentially prohibitively priced, and it will not survive once we start looking at the bills coming due in the next few decades.
Regarding taxing the limit of launch capabilities, would launching small, light probes still do so? I’m not talking an Apollo mission here. How small/light a payload can we make useful, and how much effort to get it out of the gravity well?
And as far as probe costs go, is it really going to cost hundreds of millions no matter what? We can do nothing useful for less? When we read about history of war and aviation we often read about surprisingly simple and cheap things. The V-1 buzz bomb had the same payload as the V-2, and hit the same targets, but cost about $50 compared to the V-2’s $12,000, if I remember my Keegan correctly. But those days are over?
Build a ship that could fly through the sun. If we can do that, we can do anything.
Mass Driver.
Navy’s working on one, for artillery purposes.
Space based solar power collection. And it wouldn’t take anything like the money you are talking about. And it would solve a real problem down here. Take ten or twenty billion or so and make it an X prize. Jerry Pournelle has suggested this, and I don’t see a downside, other than it being out of the hands of NASA, we won’t pay a dime unless the thing is up and sending back power.
Well, if it transmits power back to Earth via microwaves, I’ve seen plenty of schlocky sci-fi scenarios where this could lead to accidents, or even weaponizatio—
—actually, I take any objections back. Either it’s relatively harmless after all, or we get a solar powered orbital death ray in addition to a perfectly green power supply? I’m not really seeing any downside, here. 
Stick some satellites with huge solar panels in Earth’s Lagrange points and have them beam that energy back to Earth.
Stick them in geosync instead—make it easier on the power beam aiming. (they wont move)
I’d say that the only really worthwhile project that exists in all space exploration at the moment is the development of the space ladder or space fountain.
But then they’re out of the sun half the time.
Let’s see, they orbit the equator, which is at 23 degrees to the ecliptic plane, nope that is not a problem over 11 months a year…
Touché
And it’s not half the time at all. The geostationary orbit has a radius of 42.000 km, earth only 6370 km, so the time in shadow isn’t long even around the equinoxes.
SimCity 2000 taught me that microwave power was dangerous and causes lots of destruction when it misses the receiving ground dish.