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Once we have a base at one of the lunar poles, we should be able to determine how much and how easy it will be to extract water from the lunar regolith in those regions. The biggest surprise, IMO, will be just just how substantial the carbonaceous and nitrogenous materials (already detected)...

Since the ISS is scheduled to be decommissioned, the future of commercial crew launches is really not in government commissioned flights to the ISS. Private commercial space stations are the future. And its rather shocking how slow and reluctant private space companies are in moving towards...

Lockheed Martin was denied acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne by the Federal government. Lockheed Martin was also not chosen to be part of the launch service team for the Space Launch System. Plus Lockheed Martin's desire to deploy propellant depots was hampered by Boeing's reluctance in that...

There is no water shortage for urbanites. For coastal populations, water can be desalinated from seawater. The twin Diablo Canyon reactors the extremist keep trying to shut down could supply enough potable water for every urban area in the state of California (enough for more than 40 million...

There's really no such thing as a water shortage for an industrialized country. And this is especially true for California. Just dedicating one of the Diablo Canyon 1 GWe plus nuclear reactors for desalination could produce enough potable water from seawater for more than 18 million people. But...

The Constellation program was originally supposed to be funded by both the end of the Shuttle program and the ISS program. But Congress and the former presidents decided to fund the alternate SLS program without ending the ISS program. And that caused annual under funding and costly delays which...

Its difficult to take Lori Garver seriously since she was hostile to prioritizing a NASA return to the lunar surface. SLS cost ballooned because it was never fully funded-- on an annual basis. Both the Shuttle program and the ISS program was supposed to be ended in order to fully fund NASA's...

Live long and prosper in your next frontier!

Its really a waste of a super heavy lift vehicle to use it for deep space crew launches, IMO. Deploying and utilizing propellant depots are the most efficient way to travel within cis-lunar space. Super heavy lift vehicles should be used for: 1. the deployment of large microgravity habitats...

I've heard figures that suggest robot cars could reduce road fatalities bu up to 95%. But I think if-- self driving-- automobiles could be clearly demonstrated to reduce road fatalities by at least 75% over the course of a decade then there could be a gradual public trend towards using...

There are all types of oxygen resources on Mars: the CO2 in the atmosphere, ice deposits (even at the equator) that are probably richer than in the Moon's polar caps, and the oxygen that inherently exist in the martian regolith. But since Perchlorate is toxic to humans, it might be better to...

You don't actually have to put nuclear power plants near anyone if you use them to produce synfuels at remote ocean sites. And there's currently an international effort to develop commercial nuclear powered sea vessels for transporting freight and for producing synfuels...

1. Per kilowatt of electricity produced, the amount of spent fuel from nuclear reactors is tiny compared to the toxic waste produced from solar. In fact, so little is produce that you could probably store all of the spent fuel ever created in the US at just one nuclear site. Of course, that's...

That budget funded the Gemini program, the Apollo program, and the Skylab program. So it gave NASA access to the Moon plus a space station for less (in today's dollars) than the Shuttle-ISS program.

China builds nuclear reactors much cheaper than in the US. And they have 11 reactors currently under construction. China also plans to deploy floating nuclear reactors. Marcel

Remember how easy it was for people back in the 1960s to build the super heavy lift three stage Saturn five and now how difficult it is to build the heavy lift SLS. Marcel

Only one person has ever died from radiation poisoning from nuclear meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. I think a nuclear worker in Japan actually fell into the reactor. Chernobyl reactors, of course, had no containment structures (bad idea). I believe Russian and probably Ukrainian...

China currently has 11 nuclear reactors under construction. India has 7 under construction. Russia, South Korea, and the UAE each have 4 under construction The US, Japan, Pakistan, Slovakia, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Bangladesh each have two nuclear reactors currently under construction. Marcel

The production of spent fuel-- is so tiny-- that you could store all of the spent fuel ever produced in the US in an area the size of a football stadium only a few meters high. That's from the US Department of Energy. But again, spent fuel is really not waste. Even though solar power only...