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United Launch Alliance Plans For 1,000 People Working In Space By 2045 (blastingnews.com)
What if you could produce rocket fuel in outer space -- making it 83% cheaper? One company sees this as the basis a self-sustaining "space economy" based on refueling Earth-orbiting spaceships. Slashdot reader MarkWhittington writes: Jeff Bezos, of both Amazon and Blue Origin, may ruminate about moving a lot of industry off the planet, but the United Launch Alliance, that joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, has a concrete plan to do so. ULA is working on an idea to have 1,000 people operating in Earth-moon space by 2045, less than 30 years away...
I guess you didn't even read the slashdot version of the article that says they can do it 83% cheaper in space...you know 'we need something that is cheaper in space than on earth'\
But your anonymous coward post does suggest you're most likely a troll or the article submitter trying to get comments.
This should have been happening in the 1980s and '90s, except that Congress decided that killing brown people was more profitable for their true constituents in the MIC. In the 1970s I (and almost everyone else) assumed that we would have people living and working in space within the next decade. Now forty years later we still only have a (comparatively) small lab in LEO. By the time Bezos and the few other visionaries finally get their operations under way I'll be far too old to go.
If I ever spend any time in California I'll make it a point to go to the grave sites of Nixon and Reagan and piss all over them
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
why not have the robots make it?
Right now, the obvious choices (perhaps in a decreasing order of probability of taking place) are: cheaper GEO operations, actual feasibility of cleaning up orbital junk, way cheaper heavy scientific missions into the solar system, Apollo-style lunar missions in the several-billion-dollar range (>10x-30x cheaper than Apollo was), a lunar base for the same capital and operating costs as the ISS is right now (which ultimately prove to be politically feasible), and finally a reasonable pathway to a mission to Mars. One somewhat less obvious but perhaps not so far-fetched idea is that this could eventually bootstrap an infrastructure for ultimately extracting fuel from NEO asteroids, or even places like Ceres, where we know there's a shitload of water but in a much shallower gravity well (the Moon kind of sucks in this respect - less than the Earth but it still sucks).
Ezekiel 23:20