Japanese moon base
 

I'm not reserving tickets just yet, but does anyone else pine for the days when American companies had the hutzpa to plan stuff like this?

http://science.howstuffworks.com/moon-base-news.htm

Maybe Japan can plan moonshots because they aren't throwing billions and billions of dollars down a bottomless rat's hole in Iraq.

Just sayin'...

You say moonshots, I think goatse. I'm just not scientifically minded.

Good for them if they do it I say. If it was suggested in Britain the cost would be immediately calculated in hospitals (i.e. how many hospitals you could build for the same money) and squashed by the tabloids.

Something along those lines would also happen here. Iraq is now just the most popular focus of media bitching, if we had never gone in there we still wouldn't be planning a moon mission. Just refer to the Homeless thread to witness what some people think is a better use of our money.

Well, that's true enough, since we never budgeted for Iraq.

Just take your health care system private. No one will ever mention hospitals again, because they won't be able to afford to use them.

Moon schmoon... we be headed fer Mars!

Yeah, but we're planning on raping and pillaging the Moon on the way.

If they are serious about this, there are a shitload of engineers knowledgeable in the whys and wherefores of space travel, in this country. As luck would have it, most are also underemployed, too. :D

Elsp, Elsp, that is overly geocentric thinking, and not appropriate to the lunar sphere. On Earth we must worry about our natural life-support system: our biosphere. Show me a lunar biosphere. If you can't, quit thinking like a Terran flatlander, eh?

One thing you cannot do is pollute a vacuum. Manufacture in space doesn't pollute the air or the water, and it offers, free for the taking, a continuous flow of energy and all the hard vacuum you'll ever want.

They found oil????? :eek:

:thumbsup:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Methinks UG has forgotten that it is already a serious concern of our space program that so much "space garbage" is orbiting our planet in that vacuum that a collision with some of it could take out the Space Shuttle. There is not just Gene Rodenberry's ashes up there, it is every booster rocket part, dead satellites, and innumerable other debris far enough out of the gravity which would bring it flaming back down. Everything we launch into space increases this form of pollution, this stuff can't be mapped and it will stay there forever.

UG will forget anything that is inconvenient to his current stance :P