The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.

Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.

A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.

http://dollyknot.com

Hello kolos, nilchak, pasih, WilliePre and zairs

The only way out is up.

im in orbit now!

I like the site. The feature on rollerman was fun.

bathroom tiles? damn someone has pretty expensive taste for interior decorating....

Then why not give the link?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qQ56qYy3r8

The decor for some people has more importance for some folk than the context.

Are you aware of the difference between 'top down' thinking and 'bottom up' thinking?

Or perhaps you think 'thinking' has no verticality of direction?

but the panama canal has an instant and recognisable cash benefit for the massive outlay, while space exploration sadly does not, now if the moon was full of unobtainium... :P

I am aware about the fact that bathroom tiles and ceramic tiles manufactured to spaceships thermal shields differ so much that those have nothing in common. details matter especially because you seem to know for what the tiles are about..

and btw the tiles aren't for ascending at all, they're needed for descending only and just to make spacecraft reusable, nothing more.

and btw it would be realistic to discount the capital costs to the end price. for example if I pay 5 million dollars for a oil rig and I get 40 cent discount per fuel liter for that and I drive 10k km per year with 7l/100km average consumption for my whole life, is it worth it?

spoiler: I would save 18 million dollars in total, but with 5% interest the discounted price spent to oil rig would be 98 million dollars.... so in the last line there is only one number: $-80000000 (sorry for non-american marking of that)