Critical time

The MIT study made no attempt to factor construction & infrastructure costs
into its Lunar mass driver calculations; & so came up with a figure which is
almost ridiculously low in comparison to the real cost of such a system.

Lunar mass drivers require so much technology to be placed into space to
support the technology that it isn't hard to work the numbers to show that
it's cheaper to build most space platforms by constructing them on - &
launching them from - Earth, no matter how how terrestrial launch costs are
or how low the marginal launch costs of mass drivers are.

In Cosmos, Sagan drily observed that in order to create an apple pie from
scratch, you needed to first create the universe - lunar mass drivers are
similar.

All the best,
Robert Clements Robert.Clements@...
endeavour2 project http://www.geocities.com/robtclements/endeavour2.html>