New here, asteroids prefered

2. "Use the Earth crossing asteroids as travelling habitat/spacecraft to transport men, materials and ships to the vicinity of Mars, Deimos, Phobos and the Belt and back. All of that can be accomplished in 30-40 years if we make it a priority"

That timetable seem very optimistic. Based on the national priorities on earth and budgets, the only way we'd get funding for this, would be after great advancements in robotics or launch costs. Does anyone see a great breakthrough in launch costs the next decade? Most likely, the pilot programs would be out there now. Therefore, that agreesive timetable would depend on getting minimal mass out of this gravity well and not worrying about how a crew returns. (focus on robotics)

National priorities and funding become less and less of an obstacle as private sector gains more and more experience and infrastructure in space. SSP is an energy resource too important to the planet to be long put off, and there'll be too much money to be made in nexgen power for private enterprise to hesitate long once ssto makes achieving orbit economical and something that can be done routinely and often. Private aerospace companies in US are too close to accomplishing too many diverse ssto configurations to be able to judge which one or more of them will emerge as the eventual mainstay, but with a new influx of money and finally some official acknowledgement progress can not fail to accelerate. Whether it's Bigelow or some other company that gets serious about establishing manned installations on a larger scale to include industrial capability to begin producing and deploying powersats, someone will, and probably sooner than later. Some or all of the necessary materials for these development will come from terrestrial mining/processing and then be shipped to orbit. We should, to the best of our ability, minimize this for the simple reasons that it's the most costly in terms of monetary and lift charges and in terms of damage to the environment in producing/processing. Personally, I hope that someone gets the idea soon to mount a salvage company enterprise in leo cleaning up and recycling all the trash in orbit. Following that, go in two ways, start sweeping up the thousands of earth crossing asteroids and establish some kind of habitat on the moon to look into methods of processing whatever can be gotten there, though it won't be easy. I can see all this happening in a decade and a half, after all, we went to the moon, landed men and brought them back in five years less than that. And, that was 40 years ago, built on a miniscule data base compared to ours and entailed virtually no financial incentive, compared to trillions in potential profits. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us that believe in human presence in space) I see little application for robotics in this progression save for lunar development and possibly drone rock hunters/tugs. With NASA putting its $'s and dreams into extraterrestrial vehicles, new ssto's from private sector, flourishing industry in orbit and an ever increasing need for resources on earth and in orbit, I see nothing unrealistic or overly optimistic in my original timetable: "Use the Earth crossing asteroids as travelling habitat/spacecraft to transport men, materials and ships to the vicinity of Mars, Deimos, Phobos and the Belt and back. All of that can be accomplished in 30-40 years if we make it a priority." Granted, adapting an asteroid to use as a permanent spacecraft/base/settlement, together with orbital modification may be at the edge of do-ability in that time frame, but, given the fact that it would be tantamount to having an elevator from Earth to Mars and the asteroids, it would be worthwhile to make it a priority.