A recent poll question asked if going back to the moon would be a great achievment. I said no if it was just another space race to beat the Chinese.

Going back to the moon to do something - that's totally different.

Found this article in www.space.com If NASA could travel reliably to the moon and learn to "live off the (lunar) land", massive solar farms that always face the sun could be built. Power could be microwaved to geostationary satellites, then beamed to where needed on the surface. Potentially, this could entirely replace fossil fuel.

Think of the future hot-roddrer: "I have an EV with a kick-butt 2-meter power antenna."

 

Sounds good in theory but then electric rates would be $1K per 1KWh... Think we just need to harness fusion power and H2 power for now to keep costs down. Besides, with a virtually unlimited supply of cheap coal to burn that's what we will keep doing until the earth becomes an overheated wasteland....

 

Considering NASA's difficulty just going into low-earth orbit, gettting back to the moon reliably would be a challenge.

Another slant: If the US had the ablity to beam mega-watts of power from the moon to power a large city, it could probably be used to fry a city - think of the uproar.

 

I need to go and claim that "one acre of land on the moon" I bought a few years ago.



Wonder how land prices have escalated since then?

 

Collecting solar power on the moon and beaming it by microwave back to Earth is about as efficient as buying a cray supercomputer in order to generate enough heat from it's electronics to use as a water heater in your home. There's absolutely, positively no reason to spend MY money (which is what they mean when they say tax dollars) putting anything at all on the moon.

As far as power generation goes, the most powerful electric generation station in the world is the Three Gorges Dam, slated to be fully operational and producing 18Gw of electricity by 2009. If we can do all that just with water coming down a river, I'm quite sure there's no reason to go to the moon for any reason.

 

Consider I learned of this idea on Art Bell's Coast to Coast - where there is nightly discussion of UFO's, the paranormal, conspiracy theories, and other BS.

 

You've probably heard how the whole initial moon landings had to be staged (from a purely scientific point of view) and that there have been visits to the moon, but not with the technology that they show us. You may have also heard about the theories (or even some personal testimony) of what exactly the space shuttles are shipping. Some of it sounds pretty crazy, but really some of it is able to explain a lot of the really weird stuff that's been going on at NASA and in the military for so long. I'm skeptical of the theories, but I'm equally as skeptical of the official story.

 

If you dare take away any of the 2m spectrum from the Amateur Radio Service (ARS) I will be very upset.

CQ CQ de KB2EEN

 

Yeah, putting solar panels on the moon would be a great thing... for creating a real-live Star Wars scene. Imagine the city of Los Angelos, powered 80% by lunar solar, and the Chinese decide to send a nuclear missile to the moon and vaporize the solar collectors. The riots in the Inner Cities would make Rodney King look like a schoolyard scuffle.

 

I'm not so sure anyone could easily nuke a lunar solar farm - the power beam would probably be directed at the missle in the event of an attack. That would be a political hot potato as China and others would claim a lunar solar farm was really a military weapon....