And then they go on about colonizing Mars, of all the solar system's ass-holes, why Mars? It is compleatly undefended from solar flares because it has no magnetic field. Mars' core is D-E-D; solid and inactive. Going to Mars is like going to the Moon, walk outside without a space suit on and you die and you still have to bury the colony to not die from solar storms, except that it takes longer to get there.
And that pisses me the hell off! I got to sit down and watch the history channel tell me that the most advenced, bleeding edge state of the art space ship that we can muster, the Ares IV, is a fucking chemical rocket! It can do it in 6 months in a God-damn Holman transfer when we've been sitting on the Orion's technology for over 40 years, and Nuclear Rockets for over 50.
Now, I know how I could lift us and keep us out to as far as the Moon using a simple four step PLAN:
- 1: MONEY
The only reason why anybody is going to do anything in any meaningful fashion is money, forcing an economic imperitive that makes people want to do simething, so the Idea is solar POWER SATELLITES: 100% clean energy from when they are set up untill the sun goes all "red giant" in about 5 billion years, we bottle it up in a microwave beam and send it to recieving stations on earth that sell the power for shineys. They (POWER SATELLITES) need to be huge, because I said so. Seriously like 10s of kilometers accross. And we're gonna build a whole bunch of them. Doing so is a logisical nightmare if you plan on boosting that shit from earth to synchronous orbit, and waaaay to fuckin' expensive. So instead we're gonna build a STARSHIP to found a MOON COLONY that builds the POWER SATELLITES, savy?
2: STARSHIP
We are going to build a STARSHIP to move shit around in space. It will be kick-ass, because I said so; your horseshit chemical rockets can't join our "No Homers Club". They can join the "LEO bitch movers" club, until the Liberty Ship gets built, then they can get bent. Check out those 40 and 50 year old rockets to see what this is gonna be. The STARSHIP(s) are to move the men and materials to set up the MOON COLONY, located on the mother-fucking Moon.
3: MOON COLONY
There is no fucking way those POWER SATELLITES are ever going to be boosted from earth, ever. You gotta mine the shit out out of the Moon, build them, then push them with your STARSHIPS into geo-synchronous orbit. These POWER SATELLITES are gonna be big, and you gotta mine the metal, work it and build those fuckers in sections on the moon, and that is gonna take people. Miners, smelters, heavy industry, manufacturing, electronics- all that shit takes people, and then you gotta feed them, so add hydroponic farmers to the list. And these people have to stay on the moon to do their jobs, and that means they want stuff. That means they're gonna spend their shines on a moonuler* economy, and before you know it you have a service industry, in space. All this to get to the big payoff.
4: POWER SATELLITES
This is the whole fucking point. To get here you need a thriving MOON COLONY to make them, and a small fleet of STARSHIPS to move them into position. You can now make MONEY by providing power, [/i]anywhere on Earth[/i], no matter how remote, uplifting the citizens of the world with the power of electricity. McDonalds, Walmarts, and economical/cultural sublimation to follow.
Main Entry: Moon·u·ler
Pronunciation: ˈmün-ü-lər
Function: adjective
Date: This Post
1 : of, relating to, or constituting the mother-fucking Moon.
Naturally, the POWER SATELLITES, STARSHIPS, MOON COLONY, and MONEY need to be defended to prevent people from breaking your shit and taking it away, which necessitates the need of an armed security force capable of stopping the seizure of ground installations and the MOON COLONY in misguided nationalization attempts, and for the STARSHIPS and POWER SATELLITES to be tricked out with lasers to defend against missile attacks. Of course hilarity ensues when people realize that you now have the ultimate high ground and actually get to pull the rocks fall everyone dies stunt.
Now that the tirade is over, I need a reason to go to the other planets, besides the standard "for the lols". Europa has water and Titan has atmosphere, but neither has an actual economic imperitive for a human presence that I can think of. Any ideas?
As an aside, the PLAN falls apart if we ever harness fusion power, because then there is no reason for the POWER SATELLITES cuz you could get 99.9% clean energy for the next 5 billion years and bounce a microwave beam off a satellite to a reciever station anywhere in the world. I know. Ironically, I believe that if we harness fusion power, Humanity will never have a reason to expand beyond Earth for the next 5 billion years.