Building A Space Base, Part 2: How Much Money Would It Take?

universetoday.com ^ | on November 4, 2014 | Elizabeth Howell

[BenLurkin]

Yesterday, Metzger outlined the rationale for establishing a base in the first place, while today he focuses on the cost.

UT: Your 2012 paper specifically talks about how much development is needed on the Moon to make the industry “self-sustaining and expanding”, but left out the cost of getting the technology ready and of their ongoing operation. Why did you leave this assessment until later? How can we get a complete picture of the costs?

PM: As we stated at the start of the paper, our analysis was very crude and was intended only to garner interest in the topic so that others might join us in doing a more complete, more realistic analysis. The interest has grown faster than I expected, so maybe we will start to see these analyses happening now including cost estimates. Previous analyses talked about building entire factories and sending them into space. The main contribution of our initial paper was to point out that there is this bootstrapping strategy that has not been discussed previously, and we argued that it makes more sense. It will result in a much smaller mass of hardware launched into space, and it will allow us to get started right away so that we can figure out how to make the equipment work as we go along.

[from occupied ga]

So was setting sail on the open oceans 500+ years ago.

First totally irrelevant "analogy" of the thread award. Congrats.

[from occupied ga]

It’s the only option we DO have.

"We" don't have the option. Proof? Get in your car and drive to the moon. Can't be done.