Originally Posted by festivalnut

well most of the governments would face a revolution if they started pumping 50% of their gdp into space exploration!
such a large investment would probably depend mostly on private investment, and with the short/medium term reward being cerebral rather than monetary, not many of the people or business with the amount of money we're talking here would be willing to invest at the moment.

Originally Posted by Dollyknot

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.

Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.

A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.

http://dollyknot.com

Originally Posted by festivalnut

well most of the governments would face a revolution if they started pumping 50% of their gdp into space exploration!
such a large investment would probably depend mostly on private investment, and with the short/medium term reward being cerebral rather than monetary, not many of the people or business with the amount of money we're talking here would be willing to invest at the moment.

Originally Posted by Dollyknot

Money don't feed people, work feeds people, money is an insidious form of slavery, performed with the desire to depersonalize the persons wallet you are trying to empty, justified by calling them a 'punter' like 'punters' are somehow not human, so it is okay to rip them off?

Originally Posted by Icyseanfitz

ya but whats stopping countries rolling in money? if we dont do thing because the cost scares us we will get no where plus there was a good plan to go to mars for a year that really wouldn't have costed much, it was to send two space craft to mars the first an unmanned space craft with hydrogen fuel for a return trip and then a manned craft to mars

Originally Posted by Dollyknot

First we must make the achievement of human orbital velocity far cheaper and safer than than the shuttle made it.

Using the the provable rocket fuel that is probably on the moon is the way forward.

Apart from the fact that it worked, the Apollo program was remarkably silly if the rocket fuel was already up there, why go to the extraordinary effort of lifting all that delta v up from the ground, when it is up there already?