Universal conquest program.

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Forget universal healthcare, how about universal conquest as a party goal? Would you vote for someone who desires to develop an active and self sufficient space industry and expand ever outward?

Doing it right would completely deplete our manpower and resources for other things, and getting enough forced labor in the 3rd world countries would be a problem.

Good luck.

The Republican House just proposed slashing an additional $2 billion from the NASA budget. There is broad support for space, it's just not very deep.

Dream on ... the only 'space" that most of us can look forward to is in the unemployment line.

Forced labor in the third world countries? I'm not talking about conquering the world, but expanding out into space. We could build electromagnetic catapults to launch supplies into space, construct a space elevator, make a fleet of hydrogen scramjets space planes similar to those which England is developing, develop an orbital construction vehicle so as to assist in building larger space stations capable of rotational replacement of gravity and even some degree of agriculture so as to not be dependent upon the surface of the Earth for food (the centrifugal stations could produce the food and the other stations dependent on them for food could ship back the manure to be sterilized and used as plant nutrients), the moon is going to be mined for water ice starting in 2015 if Stone Aerospace keeps its deadline anyhow, so further development of the moon could be done with regards to mining materials to build ships and tunnels for habitation and later Mars likewise when mining of the asteroid belt is finally underway.

And those who are unemployed can find work. I think those who have difficulty finding work because they hate how corrupt management usually is ought to be managers and people who were formerly corrupt managers ought to scrub toilets.

You would enjoy Michael Flynn's series :

http://www.amazon.com/Firestar-Saga-Mic ... 0812530063

Me I cannot see it anytime soon.

As far as I am aware the next expansion into space is dependent on carbon-nanotube technology reaching the mass production stage (so one can build a space tether); we aren't there yet. One needs to wait for Werner Von Braun before one plans to build rockets; that said, an increase in the science budget for nanotech would be appreciated.

Even this audience of aspies, which I would wager is more geeky and more space minded than the average audience, would yield few votes for such a platform at this juncture in history.

You picked a bad time to sell this to the american public.

If we were not in a recession, did not have a dangerously huge deficit, and were not in three wars, then some americans might be open to keeping more than a toe in space travel.

But even then you would have to be a better salesman for this product.

Dangle something shiny in front of us.

Why should we (or most non-space cadet americans) vote for sending our money into space?

Thats what we need to hear.

The shiney thing could be a scarce rescource for the Earth itsself that can be mined or harvested somehow from space in such quantity that it would ease life down here on earth in the not to distant future if we got this space colonization thing rolling.


I suggest that that resource could be energy.

Havent kept up, but years ago there was talk of building those cylindrical "rotational space colonies" you mentioned (the rotation would simulate gravity- you would walk on the outer walls). These could grow to become orbiting cities. The talk was that the inhabitants would be employed in building and placing solar collector sattelites in space. These satlelites (being above the atmosphere) would have access to intense solar light (and maybe cosmic rays as well) and would harvest the energy and then would beam the solar energy back to earth power stations via microwave supplying the earth with electricity. Thus supplementing coal, and nuclear.
I dont know if this vision is still considered feasible or not.


But if it is - who knows- space could become the next persian gulf.
The prospect of indenpendence from the terrestrial persian gulf could be enticing bait for the electorate.

We'd need forced labor and conquered lands to build a space program of that size and scope. Despite our huge population and vast territory we do not sufficient reserves of some rare earth metals, we need people for support industries as well as people to do jobs related to keeping up our society's quality of living. We can't afford to outsource a whole second workforce that big even at 3rd world wages, and environmental laws and labor/safety laws compound the price, so we'd need to conquer lands with the resources we are short on and conquer the people to get it for us. We would also need to build them farm camps and other support industries for the mining camps, which would require even more labor.

Passenger scramjets? Are you serious? Nobody who has seen the NASA tests is likely to get on one of those anytime soon.

Well, we could get out of our current wars, stop funding our enemies, utilize our land's own natural resources rather than foreign resources for energy (opening coal mines/quarries perhaps with robotic vehicles mining rather than human lives at risk), reduce taxes, reduce the taxation on manufacturing in the USA so as to allow manufacturing to actually be profitable here again, get rid of "at-will employment" or at least alter it so that employers can't abuse it as they have been, direct research towards carbon nanotubes and tell the UN to deal with itself while we develop nuclear pulse propulsion, and get rid of the requirement of listing previous job history so that more people can get employed even if they've had employment gaps. Basically, in addition to cutting spending, also make it so that job seekers have an easier time finding work. Workers are consumers, so the more people employed the better the economic situation. Also, we could fill much of the deserts of this country with various forms of solar energy collectors and sell excess power off to other countries.



Certainly, thermocouple or photovoltaic arrays could be deployed and the electrical energy obtained from light could be stored in batteries to be shipped downward in trade for other items (such as uncharged batteries plus service charge of items of interest like steak or books or whatever agreed upon).



Getting away from the stupid politics of Earth would be enough for me, although being humans we'd take our nature with us to some degree or another, but being further away from most of humanity would be preferable to me at least. And mosquitoes too.

The Stanford Torus design could have many toroids linked up along a central axis, similar to the ship Ares in Red Mars

I'm not referring to NASA's, but UKSA's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28 ... RE_Engines and sorry, not scramjet but a similar type, using stored hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen while in enough atmosphere and then switching to on-board oxygen.

I'll see about getting a copy of these. Currently reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein, but that sounds a whole lot better to me. I've just now gotten through to where Manuel O'Kelly and the Professor are politicking on Earth... kinda am still waiting for Mike to "throw rocks at Terra." because that'd be the good part of the book, instead of all the talk of incest and other random weirdness stuff that Heinlein seems to have idealized within his own mind when he wrote that book. The premise of the book you suggest sounds almost precisely like today. It would be nice if we can get out of this current economic rut and start really developing the space industry.

If we wait for another Werner Von Braun rather than getting off our own butts and doing our own work towards becoming spacefaring, we will be waiting until the end of time. As for myself, next year I'm going into an aeronautical engineering program at my local university and I hope to later design some useful spacecraft myself.

Kill all the bureaucracies and there's your extra workforce and a whole lot more money.

Conquest of what?

ruveyn