[Cincinatus' Wife]

Yes the cost will be high (not your gold plated city model) but we need to back. The alternative is handing control of our national security and our economic security to those still interested in building a lunar outpost. The cost and consequences of that shortsightedness is incalculable.

It would seem some would rather go nowhere than go back to the Moon. Sour grapes perhaps?

[boris]

My sour grapes are about joining the space program in 1975, thinking I would help build nuclear rocket engines to send people to Mars.

I have now decided that we should stop developing new boosters and keep using the ones we have. Spend $500 billion over the next, I dunno, 50 years to build space elevators. The only potentially-feasible technology for breaking the $10K per pound bottleneck. Once you can put mass in GEO for ~$1/lb, then we can talk about grandiose plans for lunar colonies etc.

--Boris