Fusion power has always been just a few years away. However, I don't expect it to be used for anything except making very loud noises anytime soon.
, if we can land on the things and mine them for useful materials that are virtually non-existant on earth but plentiful in space like irridim
You science fiction fans are somewhat self-contradictory. One one hand you say there are all these economic benefits of stuff to be had in space, but on the other you are adamant that the government rob the rest of us to get there because it's too expensive for private enterprise to get to space.
What use is He3 btw. I understand that it has some possible uses in thermonuclear weaponry, but other than that what?
There ain't nothing in space that is worth the cost of getting it.
Well they haven't and probably won't any time soon, but what they really left out is the concentration an how much lunar rock you'd have to process to get significant amounts of He3. I didn't see the concentration of He3 in lunar rock mentioned anywhere, but it has to be vanishingly low.
Nope you are missing the point. There isn't anything on the moon mars venus etc. that is worth the cost of getting it. Heinlein notwithstanding, we can't "live" on the moon as a self sustaining entity. It costs too much for what you get. When you see the economically viable self sustaining antarctic civilization then you might have some sort of basis for your assumption (but even antarctica has air and doesn't cost .1% of the GDP to get there)
Well here we differ. $820,000,000 for pictures of rocks and dust fall into the category of wild ass spending to me.
Your attitude seems to basically shake out to "I don't understand what you people are talking about, and I don't want to actually sit down and learn about it, so it must not be important. I've seen enough in Scientific Amercian to know that much!"
That is a silly way to look at anything. I just don't get why you are so animated about this. Heck, if you spent this much energy fighing pork barrel spending, or just getting Rober Byrd exiled, we could cut everyone's taxes in half and declare victory in the budget wars. NASA's budget is freaking tiny compared to the rest of the federal budget.
And even if you had a terribly knock-out argument why you fell this way, you haven't really shown it. From what I can tell, you simply seem to begrudge the $10 a year it will take to keep ahead of the ChiComs. You just insult us and say that it isn't worth it. Ugh, yeah, I'm in a foul mood. :p Sorry