Titan: The next middle-east?

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Black hole power is also practical.

Well there is the Shackleton Energy Company that wants to start robotic surface ice mining on the Moon with operations start date in 2015. This doesn't involve any human travel to the Moon. It will likely involve tech proven on Mars albeit probably a bit cheaper. The ice in Shackleton crater is believed to be simply sitting there so all it involves is using lasers to cut/burn out 'cubes' of ice and then using a transponder road, bring it back to a rocket fuel factory (also automated). Further chemical launches would be used to get the rocket fuel into space and then shipped to orbital gas stations. Later mass drivers might be used. Chances are they will be using SpaceX for launch and Bigelow for modules. Stone Aerospace itself is a pioneer in deep sea ROV tech so I think they are capable of putting together the required robotics for a lunar operation (where extreme pressure becomes a non-issue)

That's all fine and dandy though but there has to be profit to encourage people to actually use Stone/SEC's facilities. The space tourist industry will certainly help provide funding, and there is already one promotion I am aware of: Win a trip to space! :O :O

VASIMIR being put up into space in 2014 will probably change things. Plans are for it to be mounted on the ISS for station keeping and space testing. Using this kind of engine could make longer distance trips much more feasible. If that is the case it would be more realistic to be able to get to resource-rich asteroid, for example. At the current time it isn't really profitable to spend all the time getting there and trying to teleoperate robotic mining vehicles with a large time delay. But if you can send say 10 people there in a few weeks to stay there in shifts of several months and operate the robots without time delay and with direct oversight it becomes more realistic. And asteroid mining is really the key to space infrastructure. It is simply too expensive to send the material required for, say, a space elevator, into space from Earth.

Better would be to send a small crew on a spacecraft using combined VASIMIR/Solar sails (not unlike the steam/sail hybrids of the early modern period) to a proper material candidate such as a Vestoid-class asteroid. Once there they commence mining to construct mass drivers to propel the asteroid into a very high Earth orbit. For the next few decades semi-automated miners would build 60,000 km of carbon-nanotube wound cable from the asteroid itself, down towards the Earth's surface, where it would 'dock' somewhere in the equatorial regions. Thus Earth would have it's first space elevator and greater amounts of people would be able to go into space cheaply. The remaining asteroid material would probably be used as the counterweight for the elevator

Additionally space plane technology seems to be getting more advanced. Before a cable ever becomes a reality it might be possible that more advanced space planes will be responsible for taking people into LEO where they will board proper space craft.

Asteroids really are the key to space infrastructure. Having excellent semi-autonomous and autonomous robotic mining/manufacturing technology, more advanced carbon nanotube/fullerene technology, VASIMIR-type engines or better, solar sails, and probably space based nuclear-electric power, will also be necessary, just to be able to get out to asteroids. Space planes as well will play an important part. The hollowed out shells of the asteroids could be put into Lagrange points where they could be spun to generate artificial gravity of whatever g you desire

:lmao: what a mind f**k!! !

There's a rather famous story of NASA spending like a million dollars or more to develop a pen to write in space. The Russians just used pencils...

Lol, I guess you build a tolerance to that stuff. For me that's my top 40/pop.