[Frank]

The Sun is beaming orders of magnitude more energy to the Earth than this system can beam from the moon.

So why don't we build this "energy base" on Earth and forget about beaming the Sun's energy from the Moon to Earth and instead get the energy directly from the Sun?. The concept of PV solar basically.

Don't we have the raw materials that exist on the Moon here on Earth?

Bingo!

[JohnDenver]

Also, telepresence is a practical idea which is at the engineering level, as shown by the success of the recent mars rovers.

As Devil pointed out so well, creating a factory that takes lunar dust and makes complex things out of it is automation on a different scale than we currently have.

Is it? I'm not so sure. Even Devil admits that some parts of electronic manufacturing are almost entirely automated. Here's one example:

[quote]They’re called FOUPs, for front-opening unified pods, they number in the thousands and they’re zipping around continuously overhead.

No, it’s not the climactic invasion scene from Hollywood’s latest space aliens movie. Rather, it’s a real-world scene at a state-of-the-art semiconductor wafer fabrication line operated by IBM Corp., in East Fishkill, N.Y. The 140,000 square foot, $2.5 billion facility, which went operational in mid-2002, is “the first fully automated semiconductor manufacturing line in the world, where the system makes the decisions about what product to run next, how to run it, when to run it and why,â€

[JohnDenver]

the ISS is a joke and a terrible waste of time/money.

Wow, you are a big space exploration fan.
Are you opposed to all work in space? Or just the ISS?

Personally, I think we should put as much tonnage into space as we possibly can to bring down launch costs. For example, I'd like to see the ISS commercialized, and turned into a space hotel for millionaire space tourists. Keep adding to it like lego until it's huge. I'd also like to see more work on space mirrors, and LEO satellite swarms for power generation. In fact, I'd like to see the entire space program restructured to make profit and energy production the #1 priority.

[JohnDenver]

Also, telepresence is a practical idea which is at the engineering level, as shown by the success of the recent mars rovers.

This factory-colony would have to have the ability to practically fix itself.

Why not tend/maintain and repair the machines remotely? Why not operate mining machines remotely?
Here's a picture of a doctor doing gallbladder surgery on a patient in 2001:


If you can do surgery on a person via telepresence, why can't you maintain a machine on the moon via telepresence?

[SidneyTawl]

The best proposal I have seen for taking material in and out of space is the "space elevator". Carbon nano tube "rope" carrying a lift to and from a geo-syncrous station with a corresponding "counter weight" going out into space.

If you like space and have not seen the pictures of IAPETUS taken by Cassini then you are in for a treat.

12 mile high "ridge"running a round the "non oval" moon.

Then that "tower"looking thing that seems to go out several miles into space.

hmmm, it looks just like the ol "space weapon planet" from Star Wars part 1. in some ways.

That ridge looks like, well, make your own opinion. Its very odd. very.

not kidding.

[nero]

John,

The idea of a remotely controlled factory-colony and remote control repairs all sounds great, but it is adding complexity to the factory-colony and hence cost. I didn't imagine that the transportation cost would be the expensive part of the lunar factory-colony. It was simply in my opinion that the factory-colony would have to be significantly larger, more ruggid, more capable and more self-suficient than the ISS. You're right this is just an uninformed opinion, until somebody sits down and does the real engineering assessment of the factory-colony requirements no-one has an "informed" opinion.

But what's there to lose? Even if the project costs $1 trillion, that's still only about 2% of the gross world product for a single year (or .2% of the GWP over 10 years). If we succeed, our energy problems are solved. If we don't, we're screwed and we regress to the 18th century, which is what's going to happen anyway if we don't make the attempt.

It's amazing how a trillion dollars has suddenly not become such a big deal. It is a verly large chunk of change to lay down on a spin of a roulette wheel. I don't know if any single project in the history of humanity has cost that much. How much did the Normandy invasion cost? I actually agree with you that we should make the attempt but the problem is that neither you nor I have a trillion dollars to spare so NASA would have to get out the begging bowl and there are alot of competing priorities.

Like what? Aside from food and basic survival needs, what could possibly be more important to an energy poor world than developing a new, unlimited energy source?

I thought it was obvious what an energy poor world would be spending it's resources on - they would spend their resources on producing and securing more energy. This demo project that might lead to a cornocopia in 20 years time would have to compete for financing against the nuclear power generators needed in 8 years time, the oil shale plant needed tomorrow, the oil sands plant needed yesterday and the oil resource war being fought today.

[ohanian]

I believe that it is called
project April Fool

[Mercani]

The Sun is beaming orders of magnitude more energy to the Earth than this system can beam from the moon.

So why don't we build this "energy base" on Earth and forget about beaming the Sun's energy from the Moon to Earth and instead get the energy directly from the Sun?. The concept of PV solar basically.

Don't we have the raw materials that exist on the Moon here on Earth?

Case closed ! Why are you discussing?

Do you think that we are already harnessing billions of terrawatts of solar energy shining on Earth, therefore we need the additional solar energy on the moon?

Get real !

[JohnDenver]

Case closed ! Why are you discussing?

Mercani,
For certain locations, such as deserts, I agree that a full-scale terrestrial solar effort should be made. Solar panels all over buildings is also a good idea, as is solar hot water heating.
In most locations, however, solar power has the profound and obvious defect that it is intermittent. It is interrupted by the weather, night etc. This means it can only supply 20% of grid power at best. How will you make up the other 80%? Nuclear is a good choice, which I support, but spreading breeder reactors all over the world may involve serious security/waste issues and other significant costs/disadvantages.

Do you think that we are already harnessing billions of terrawatts of solar energy shining on Earth, therefore we need the additional solar energy on the moon?

We can't harness all the energy incident on the earth, unless you want to cover the entire surface of the earth with solar panels, and live under them. Real estate is precious, Mercani. There are real limits to the amount of terrestrial area we can cover with PV. The moon doesn't have these limits, and the radiation which strikes it is much more intense.

[Licho]

It's certainly cheaper and easier to exploit energy down on Earth first. It's far easier to build PV panels on sahara, wind turbines along coast, and coal plants with CO2 fitlers everywhere than to make automated colony on Moon..
When we come to limits of energy exploitation here on Earth (due to negative impacts of these space-requiring technologies on nature and farming), then we will consider such adventures.

Solar power sattelites are planned, but even them need many many years to pay energy for themselves, will be complex and never bring any financial benefit (at least not those that are in the draft right now). They would need to survive decades to produce enough energy, and maintenance of such thing is very complex and expensive. Things break up on regural basis, and even if you imagine some repair-robot, remotelly controlled, this would be most complex piece of technology there, and therefore likely to fail as well.
And it's still easier to put something on GEO orbit than to make some automated dream factory on Moon, producing usefull industrial components from dust..
But I will believe it, once there will be automated walking factories on deserts, making electronics from sand and creating solar panels right there..
Also, power transfer from Moon would require some gigantic antenas on both sides, even transfer from GEO orbit needs huge -multi-km antenas on Earth.

No, I don't think we will head this way, unless space elevator is built..

[Devil]

The moon doesn't have these limits, and the radiation which strikes it is much more intense.

Let's just imagine, in a moment of wild folly after smoking some opium, that your idea was feasible (and I don't admit that for a single moment). Let's analyse the reason for your statement above. Why is the radiation on the moon more intense? Because there is no atmosphere to diffract or absorb the electromagnetic (EM) radiation from the sun, like there is on earth. So what does your pipe dream do? It absorbs some energy from the EM radiation and this is used to drive 100 - 500 kW transmitters which beam another frequency of EM radiation to earth, via a parabolic antenna. The power out to the antenna would be typically 10% of the energy falling on the panels. The latter is like a good quality spotlight with the filament at the focus of a paraboloid reflector. Whereas the beam is narrowly focussed and may give a spot of, say, 10 cm diam at a few metres, at 200 or 300 m, it has widened to, say, 2 metres. In addition, if you look at the beam pattern, you will see quite a bit of light scatters outside the beam.

Obviously, you will want to keep the beam as narrow as possible. The gain of a parabola = 4 pi *(mouth area/wavelength^2), so you want to keep the wavelength as small as possible. This is where the crunch comes. a) high powered CW devices to transmit at the shortest wavelengths do not exist. At the moment, we currently use up the lower wavelengths of the EHF band (~1 cm or 30 GHz) and it is difficult to transmit more than a few tens of watts CW at this frequency. As this is a pipe dream, let's imagine that we suddenly endow ourselves with the wherewithal to generate EHF in the MW power range, What then? b) we have a nice sharp beam leaving the moon from a parabola with a mouth diameter of, say, 1 km. Will that beam be 1 km wide when it has travelled 400,000 km? No way! Even assuming the parabola is geometrically perfect (how?), the beam is much more likely to be 1000 km wide with a gaussian distribution of power across the diameter. This would give an extremely low divergence angle of 0.14°. (Angles of >1° are common for parabolas.) Now, EHF behaves quite a bit like light and is diffracted, albeit to a lesser extent, by gases and absorbed by clouds and water vapour (ever wonder why your satellite signal disappears in a heavy rainstorm, and that is a much lower frequency).

The point I'm making is that you would lose most of the transmitted power long before it reached the earth's surface. I very much doubt whether the overall efficiency of radiation energy reaching the earth's surface/radiation energy reaching the moon's surface would ever exceed a fraction of 1%, for which you would have spent trillions. Your opium pipe is too powerful. As I said before, come down to earth and get real.

Oh! I forgot to mention that the robots "that I admit to" still have human supervision. Even chip shooters need to have the magazine sticks or reels loaded into them by hand.

[BlisteredWhippet]

Terawatts for the People- err, the Energy Companies

Its clear this idea is framed in terms of "Our Energy Challenge" explored in this thread.. http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic5433.html

2003 Congressional Testimony on this idea:
Like hydroelectric dams, every power receiver on Earth can be an engine of clean economic growth. Gross World Product can increase a factor of 10. The average annual per capita income of Developing Nations can increase from today's $2,500 to ~$20,000.

First off, a hydroelectric dam is not an engine of "clean economic growth"- that is a deceptive euphamism for anything that enables industrial technologists to inflict damage on the environment. In WA state, for example, the dams destroyed 95% of the original salmon runs, and the electricity flows to aluminum smelters, creating all kinds of pollution, for just one example.

If LSP is possible though, this opens up enormous opportunity for developing nations to complete their transformations from agrarian, independent states to corporate controlled oligarchies denuded of natural resources. As the scale of any economy goes up, so does resource use, and habitat loss (exploitation).

JohnDenver, you should realize that alongside adequate nutrition and vaccination, a 1000% rise in GDP means more people will want to buy a Ford Explorer "Hybrid", and coffee tables made from the rarest non-local hardwoods.

Increasingly wealthy Developing Nations will generate new and rapidly growing markets for American goods and services. Lunar power can generate hydrogen to fuel cars at low cost and with no release of greenhouse gases. United States payments to other nations for oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and commodities such as fertilizer will decrease. LSP industries will establish new, high-value American jobs. LSP will generate major investment opportunities for Americans. The average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person.

Why would per capita income increase? Expect stagnation to continue with current policies. Will cheap energy stop capital flight? Outsourcing? Absolutely not. This is a variation on "trickle-down" economic theory- quite useless considering a trickle doesn't begin to compensate when you're leaking out the bottom end.

I'm shuddering to think of the enormous sums of public money it would take to develop and implement a lunar power station, and the subsequent rape of all profit by select campaign contributors- the usual suspects.

By 2050, the LSP System would allow all human societies to prosper while nurturing rather than consuming the biosphere.

Humans consume the biosphere, in the current economic and social reality. So even with LSP, for the next 45 years what can we expect? More of the same? If we implemented a primary strategy with conservation biology now, funding it equally or more so, by the time we get LSP or its equivalent we might not need even really need it.

There is very little notion of "nurture" in Criswell's "solution" to the Energy issue. Giving multinational corporations more money is throwing gasoline on a fire.

Lets see... public funding for the development and implementation of the system, private profit for the Energy Lobby, car companies, energy companies, big corporate conglomerates, the WTO and World bank for disbursing billions of "energy receivers" (at a modest cost to the recipients, of course- repayable with interest, requiring the conversion of local natural resources and commodities to cash to pay the bank back,) dividends for shareholders (top 1%) and by 2050 we'll have more pollution and industrialization than ever before along with our global energy usage around 4-5 times current levels.

These solutions always come with a stick alongside the carrot- the stick is that "the alternative is water and resource shortage, starvation, illness, and general depredation given projected population levels and energy shortages." But is it the ONLY way? Why shouldn't anyone be deeply suspicious of this plan if they've studied envioronmental issues for the past 10 years? The fact is, this is only our fate if we continue to expect the people that created the problem (wild exploitation of resources) are the only ones who can solve it. In that sense, the argument for LSP is a false dilemma.

Is there only one yellow brick road? Can't we figure out a solution where we avoid the damaging effects of the "Power Glut" while addressing the issue of the "Power shortage" alternative? What do we expect from Big Business and Government? An enlightened policy of education and conservation biology? Hell no. How about enabling everyone to accelerate their levels of exploitation and consumption- thats exactly what this is.

Its too bad. I realize I sound like a raving luddite, opposed to progress and unnecessarily hugging trees, maybe even contemptuous of human instinct and invention. I don't see 4 billion volunteers to suddenly up and leave the planet, or roll over and die. Still, I am absolutely suspicious of the corporate agenda so clearly implied by a mass technological solution.

The more I think about LSP, the more I think its the best idea anyone has come up with. Its disturbing to me personally when I agree with JohnDenver, so I had to reflect a little longer on what bothers me about the solution, and here it is:

This new power, as described by Criswell will cost less than ~.01$/day, a "boon" for everyone, as he describes it. But lets examine the facts:

NASA will implement the project along with the usual big aerospace firms: McDonnell-Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed- all top military manufacturers. Who sets policy for NASA? The Vice President- Cheney (Yeah). Who will build the land-based power converter systems? Follow the yellow brick road from Cheney- Big Energy companies including the Oil companies that will diversify using their cash reserves and engineering expertise into LSP technology. LSP's cost will not be cheap- it will be enormously expensive. The profit potential for big biz is there so naturally they will exploit it.

Criswell imagines the U.S. (Read: big corporations, multinational and non-democratic) selling the rest of the world cheap electricity. (Read: World Bank loans for power development projects.) The theory is sound- a lack of energy, we provide energy, we erase our debt and trade deficits. Will this get Joe American out of debt? Stop capital flight? I don't think so.

Criswell's plan is essentially capitalist: We aren't bringing the fire to Prometheus, we're loaning it out to him with interest. An exclusive LSP system will be a yoke around the neck of the rest of the world. Its us basically saying to the patient, "We're going to put your vegetative self on life support."

The bottom line is, this plan will bring increased wealth to a relative few. I don't see it as an engine of hope or justice or compassion, its primary purpose is to exploit a market for its capital. Why isn't there a massive manhattan project to implement it now? Because our leaders (and energy companies) don't have our best interests in mind, and never have. They dropped the ball on us with Enron and they will drop the ball on us with peak oil. Later, fabulous wealth will be created for this top 1% using LSP technology funded by the public.

In the end, all you have are more problems. Now that the US has established power superiority, the moon will be a legitamite target for nuclear weapons. We'll militarize space to defend our stations. Soon, China and Russia will want their own LSP and the moon will be stocked with microwave transmitters and solar arrays, with the US taking the best spots on the edges of course. Military conflict will be mediated by strategic interruption of the microwaves.

Environmentally, the massive changeover from oil to solar-hydrogen will begin. Raising the 3rd world to the 1st will consume the rest of availble natural resources. Pollution will become worse, not better. Consumption will skyrocket along with GDP. Anyone who still cares to check will notice global weather pattern changes. And you can bet your ass the same people (big oil, politicians, NGOs, banks) that created all these problems will be selling us the "solution".

We'll always have the power and responsibility of self-annihilation.

The only way I see a positive outcome, is if LSP is implemented, and, for instance, hydroelectric dams are torn down. Environmentally, LSP makes coal, nuclear, and oil redundant and unaffordable. LSP is too important to humanity to allow it to exist in the hands of the few, for the benefit of the few. It must be free and unexploitable. Alongside LSP must come a massive project of conservation biology (you didn't think free energy was going to instantly solve problems in biological systems, did you?).

My fear is that cheap energy will just be used to accelerate our exploitation and destruction of nature.

The jury is still out whether LSP will allow us to dodge the PeakOil economic crash bullet, the climate change bullet, the species loss bullet and the Mutually Assured Destruction bullet. That said, we're taking the corporate-rule-by-NGOs bullet in the thigh, shattering the femur, making it all the less likely we'll dodge the rest.

All I know is that this path of unlimited capitalist exploitation is wrong. If it isn't making money in creating solutions, its making money in creating problems. I would prefer if we learned to live without all this modern bullshit. I would prefer depopulation, reforestation, a massive manhattan project of conservation biology, instead of crass capitalist fantasy like LSP. I would prefer organizing a vision of the future based upon coexistence, not mere survival, with nature as an intact entity.

The LSP plan appeals to our worst instincts compared to a plan of massive conservation biology. It requires less thought. It "makes sense" in simplistic economic terms. It allows us the comfort of powerlessly giving over control of our destiny to the big business capitalists that have exploited and enslaved us all. It appeals to our fears and predjudices of technological superiority, it promises us endless wealth -if you count wealth in paper currency, not a livable, dignified natural existence. It is in short, the perfect "Magic Bullet" to the energy problem. No effort required of us except the bare minimum of compliance. The satisfaction of immediate needs met and a vague suggestion of future salvation.

Personally, I don't think its being implemented because we've never been to the moon, and no one at the top wants anyone to find out.

[JohnDenver]

They [solar power satellites] would need to survive decades to produce enough energy, and maintenance of such thing is very complex and expensive. Things break up on regural basis, and even if you imagine some repair-robot, remotelly controlled, this would be most complex piece of technology there, and therefore likely to fail as well.

There was news on this today:

"After a series of delays, NASA has scheduled April 15 as the launch date for the first robotic spacecraft designed to rendezvous in orbit with other satellites without any human intervention, officials said Friday."
LINK

The robot:

[JohnDenver]

The point I'm making is that you would lose most of the transmitted power long before it reached the earth's surface.

Devil,
Criswell has already addressed two detailed criticisms like yours:
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-8/iss-5/p28.pdf

Here's some more information on one proposed manufacturing process:

Alex Freundlich, a UH researcher, along with Charles Horton, senior research scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials, see a way to create huge solar cell arrays on the Moon. They can be fabricated by using materials found in the lunar regolith – the upper crust of the Moon.

Working with NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Freundlich and his colleagues have used "simulated" Moon material to devise solar cell devices.

The work has lead to a master plan for the Moon.

What’s required is a robotic lunar rover that cuts across the Moon’s surface, melting the regolith into a very thin film of glass. Then, a thin film of solar cells is applied to that lunar glass substrate. An array of such lunar solar cells could then be used as a giant solar energy converter that cranks out electricity.

http://www.space.com/news/wsc_power_1015.html

This is very interesting, and shows how a lot of the "refutations" in this thread are based on incorrect assumptions. If the solar cells are just burned directly onto the lunar surface, then the whole "lunar factory" idea is a lot simpler than it would appear at first glance. We're still thinking "inside the box" of terrestrial manufacturing techniques, so we imagine a solar panel as a finished object which comes in a box. But why not just make the ground itself the glass substrate, and do processes like (printing, cleaning, vacuum deposition etc.) on top of it, in situ, with moving rovers?

The original lunar rovers from 1970's were designed and deployed very quickly. As Criswell points out in the above cite:
"Lunar rover development began after Apollo 11, and the first rover traversed the lunar surface 33 months later."

[JohnDenver]

Criswell also claims that:
"Major LSP functional elements have been demonstrated at the appropriate scale (Ref. 1)"

The cite for Ref. 1 is as follows:

Criswell, D. R. Lunar Solar Power System: Review of the technology base on an operational LSP System. Acta Astronautica 2000, 46 [8], 531-540.

I will try to get a copy of this to improve the discussion. In the meantime, if somebody reading has better access to a university library system, maybe they would be kind enough to post a summary.

[cube]

.........
4. What technology would you use for beaming the power to earth?
............

A very long extension cord!

Sorry but I couldn't resist.

[kerosene]

The chord then again would attch to a huge power terminal which would be on a train on the equator spinning to stay correctly nder the moon all the time. As a bonus the cord itself would produce electiricity as it travels in the magnetic influence of the earth. - you see all minor problems can be overcome.

Seriously though - this moon idea is simply stupid (as mentioned) - there are lots of other alternative plans that pne can create if you can have the option of "we don't have the tech yet at all but it would be sweet".

Seriously with the money of one launch you could probably cover quite nice area of desert with solarpanels. There is plenty of room on earth to build solarplants - the cost is just too high (even down here on earth). Also all kind of maintenence and labour costly stuff should be no problem. We have plenty of people.

What interests me is solar chimney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_chimney

The efficiency isn't that great but:

1 The strcuture is so robust that great areas could be utilized with relatively low cost.

2 the codensation resulting from heat differences can be used to collect water to be used for agriculture.

Heikki


edit:

there is a thread about it and it doesn't seem too hot idea after all:
http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic5275.html

[JohnDenver]

It's certainly cheaper and easier to exploit energy down on Earth first. It's far easier to build PV panels on sahara, wind turbines along coast, and coal plants with CO2 fitlers everywhere than to make automated colony on Moon..
When we come to limits of energy exploitation here on Earth (due to negative impacts of these space-requiring technologies on nature and farming), then we will consider such adventures.

One problem with PV in the deserts is the weather. The power can be interrupted by clouds at any time, and you have to deal with issues like weathering, corrosion, and sand/grime build-up on the panels. The panels must be enclosed in protective glass, and the fabrication of that glass would require massive energy. As of 1994, EIA stats show that 60% of the energy used in glass manufacturing comes from natural gas.

On the moon, on the other hand, there is no weather. It may also be possible, on the moon, to fuse glass with lens or mirror furnaces (i.e with free, inexhaustible energy). The daylight temperature on the moon is 123°C. You can cook food there with ordinary sunlight. You could freeze food too, at night or in the shadows, because the temperature is -173 °C. And wouldn't high temperature superconductors work in the shade/night on the moon? That would be convenient for power transmission, energy storage and maglev mining etc. Oddly enough, lunar soil (regolith) is a good insulator: "A habitat less than a meter beneath the surface of Luna will experience a very constant temperature equal to its mean surface temperature. That's about -9°F (-23°C). The lunar regolith is such a good insulator that the habitat will need a heat-rejection system even at night because of the heat given off by equipment and inhabitants of the lunar habitat."(LINK)Just for comparison, -23°C is higher than some sleeping bag ratings.

Another problem is energy transmission. In the U.S., the best spot would be the southwest, but what about areas which aren't near any deserts? Do they cover up farmland, or open space, or grassland, or forest, or tundra? Covering up the Sonoran desert with solar panels or algae farms is often mentioned, but the Sonoran desert is not a dead parking lot of sand. I've seen it many times, and it is very alive and beautiful. Covering it up will only increase the footprint of man, and is in no way an "environmental" solution. (Neither is burning coal, even with filters.)

Another problem is energy storage. What do you do when sun goes down on the Sonoran Desert? This is a very severe problem with all terrestrial solar. The solar has to be parasitic on a waste generating process, like nuclear or coal.

It's also interesting to consider the geopolitics of desert power. If a desert power technology can be established, deserts will function economically like dams. The power can only be transmitted so far, so deserts and their satelittes will function as cores of development, and desert-rich countries will become rich because they own the real estate. Las Vegas will boom like never before. Is it good for the US/Europe to switch from one form of power monopolized by desert nations to another form of power with the same problem? After all, when you talk about the "Sahara", you're actually talking about the property of Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco, Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Libya, Egypt and Sudan. They'll nationalize the sands. The moon, on the other hand, doesn't belong to anybody. In fact, isn't the U.S. flag still flying up there?

In a word, the solution to peak oil is the grid. But (IMO) there are only two realistic, environmental ways to provide non-intermittent base power: nuclear and space solar (although hot dry rock may play a role at some point). I prefer the latter because it is 100% sustainable (non-peaking), eliminates toxic processes like uranium mining, and moves our footprint off-planet.

[Omnitir]

Hi guys, long time lurker, first time poster

I’m generally in agreement with John on this, as I think the only possible way to maintain an industrial society is to expand out into space. It seems obvious really as continuing endless growth is impossible in a finite system (Earth), so we must move into an infinite system (space). Unfortunately the great potential of space was not exploited when it should have been – post moon landings – and now we may have left it too late, though as JD pointed out, it’s worth attempting as it may prove to be our only chance.

However I think the LSP program is something that is more achievable as a long-term goal then as a short-term solution to the coming energy crisis. What is much more achievable in the short term (before the effects of PO kill all hopes of continuing space exploration), is space mining. The moon has much potential for development, though before we can build anything substantial (like the LSP) on the moon, we must first harvest the necessary materials from space. We cannot hope to construct everything necessary for space industrialism on Earth and then launch it into and break orbit. It’s simply too expensive to send large things to the moon.

What we must do is first begin mining/developing – in space - the basic materials required for space operations, such as propellants, shielding, and structural materials. This can be achieved in the short term, far more easily then setting up factories that produce complex objects such as solar panels. One possible plan is to extract liquid oxygen from lunar materials and supply it to low Earth orbit (LOX to LEO) for use as spacecraft propellant.

Another, potentially much more promising plan is asteroid capture. By sending a robotic Lander to an appropriate Near Earth Asteroid (NEA), we could push the asteroid into an Earth orbit to be mined for further space industrialism. There is an infinite wealth of valuable resources in asteroids, including volatiles and rare metals, which could be transported to Earth for consumption. As well as providing Earth with important resources, the right asteroid could in theory, supply most of the materials needed for a semi-closed space habitat. It could actually be possible to set up space stations constructed with shielding and structural materials mined from asteroids, and supplied with air, water and soil all obtained from asteroids.

If there is any chance at all for the continuation of industrialism, then exploiting space is the only option. We may have missed our chance to do it easily with cheap fuel, but we still have the ability to attempt it at this late stage. We should at least attempt it, for as John pointed out, what have we got to lose?

Here’s a great NASA link about mining space, [url= http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/spacesettl ... 3/toc.html ]Exploring, Evaluating, and Mining
Nonterrestrial Resources[/url]

[nero]

Omnitir has a good point. How about instead of placing all these solar panels on the moon how about putting them on a captured asteroid placed in geosyncronous orbit instead. The asteroid would have more valuable minerals. It could probaby make a supplemental income off of sending down chunks of precious metals to the earth.

I love science fiction, the possibilities are endless. I wonder how long it would take to nudge a medium sized asteroid into a geosynchronous orbit.