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Pastimes : Should U.S. attempt manned missions to the Moon? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edscharp who wrote (20)	1/13/2004 2:45:22 PM
From: Fangorn	Respond to of 41

Ed, re >The expense from launching from the moon might be small, but getting the equipment and material there will be enormous.< Sheesh, ED. The raw materials to make whatever we want is on the moon. Granted the first smelter will be built from parts brought from Earth but quite quickly everything needed to build a satellite, spaceship, robot rover, dishwasher, tv, computer would be produced on the moon from lunar materials. You really, really need an imagination transplant. re >Before we go the moon and mine their fusionable material we need to invent usable fusion reactors first< If, as the research suggests, the lunar helium will be the fuel of choice, how do you propose to build a reactor for that fuel without access to the fuel in question. There were no internal combustion engines before somebody figured out how to refine oil into suitable fuels. re>The territories of the Louisiana Purchase were easily accessible by wagon and mule, available to almost everybody at that time. Didn't require government budgets of billions of dollars or special training. < To claim that Louisiana Territory was "easily accessible by wagon and mule" betrays a dismal ignorance of reality in the early 1800s. You obviously have little comprehension of just how difficult wilderness survival much less travel was in those days. Suggest you read a little about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a group with no "special training" at all... NOT!!! Besides my point wasn't that it was as hard to get there as it was to get to the moon but that Jefferson faced many of the same arguments against spending the money that you are (attempting) to marshall. That was exquisitely clear in my original post but you managed to misconstrue it. re>Don't understand your argument with me about the asteroid. I agreed it was a legitimate concern. I don't agree that going to the moon solves the problem. If it's a guaranteed certainty that eventually an asteroid will hit the earth it's also guaranteed certainty to hit the moon too. Neh?< It is painfully obvious that you don't understand. To stop an asteroid requires some level of spacefaring ability, more than we have today. Anything that improves our spacefaring ability improves our chances of detecting and diverting said asteroid. If man is going to be anywhere in space the Moon is the obvious next step and is in fact the portal to everywhere else. So the choice is "Go to the Moon and stay or just stay home". I choose go over stay. It is physically impossible for the same asteroid to hit both the Earth and the Moon. I assume you are smart enough to know that. Of course asteroids hit the Moon too, but the odds that a lunar colony would be hit by an asteroid at the same time one hit the Earth are infinitesimally small. But of course once established offplanet we would not allow asteroids to strike either Earth or Moon, Get It Yet???