Lunar elevators

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Ian Woollard
wrote:
> Lunar beanstalks are perfectly possible within your lifetime. This
is
> something that can be done in the next 5 years, with current
> technology, and with only relatively modest funding- maybe a few
> hundred million dollars.

I love an optimist. Unfortunately, space travel is not just about
technology -- if it was, we'd have been on Mars in the 1980s and we'd
be in the asteroids, Jupiter and Saturn now. It's also about
politics and economics. I'm starting to truly think that what we do
on the Moon and Mars won't be up to Dubya or NASA, but the success or
failure of SpaceShipOne. NASA's plan puts us on the Moon by 2020.
Maybe that will be accelerated depending on private industry or
perhaps some healthy competition from the Chinese, but the history of
space flight hints that the future will continue the trend of
absolute minimum expenditure, even if the result is minimum result.
Just look at the disaster of the ISS. Maybe if some wealthy
industrialists got together for the express purpose of building a
lunar beanstalk, we'd see some results. But I foresee our lunar base
being a few balloons big enough for two or three people, with Apollo-
style vehicles to transport people and some equipment.

Has anybody here read Firestar by Michael Flynn? Or its sequel,
Rogue Star? I found them tedious, but very, very illuminating about
the politics and economics of space travel.

I wonder, if NASA had never been formed in the first place, maybe
space travel would be commonplace, and we'd be celebrating the name
of Chuck Yeager rather than Alan Shepard. (No disrespect to Shepard
or any of our other heroic astronauts, of course.)

Collin
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but
in