[wladimir]

IMO we should really be building a Lunar outpost, not because it has strategic value at this moment, but because it will have that in the future. When travel to the rest of the solar system will be more commonplace, having an outpost on the moon is of really large strategic importance.

I wish humanity could still do big, ambitious projects like that.

[philwelch]

Is that really true, though? According to this diagram, the moon seems pretty out of the way if you just want to go between Earth and, for instance, Mars. You get a lot of wasted delta-v due to the moon producing its own gravity well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deltavs.svg

[wladimir]

Interesting figure!

The low gravity is a big advantage though. It is very easy to get things into space from the moon.

So if you can construct things on the moon, you have an advantage in space. It also makes it easy to hurl things into space for more destructive reasons.

[khafra]

I'm pretty sure there are technical barriers to constructing an ore-mining-to-finished-product spaceship factory on the moon.

[wladimir]

Sure, many. It's a huge challenge. Not impossible. If we'd set it as goal, we could develop the technology and science as we go. I'm sure humanity is inventive enough. I mean, we did go to the moon with 60's technology...

But even thinking ahead more than 2 years seems impossible these days, everything is focused on the now and short-term profit. Anyway, rant over, it's nice to think big instead of small once in a while :)

[Smithi]

Eml2 would be a good place for rendezvous between earth reentry craft and interplanetary spacecraft. It's a low deltaV target from both earth surface and interplanetary trajectories, and using it would get us away from an architecture that can handle at most a 4 person mission profile.