Stuart Woodward - Live from Kurihama

The big deal is the cost of moving a stuff to the moon. I have heard it said that it costs roughly the same as an object's weight in Gold to transport it to the moon. If cost were no object, we'd be building a Starship Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica or a Death Star to cruise around the Solar System. So, you only want to lift just enough to get you to the moon and back. That means just enough fuel to push you there, slow you down into Moon orbit, gently land and just enough to lift you off again, get you back into Moon orbit and push you back to Earth. The first Apollo landing's margin of error for fuel was down to a few tens of seconds to spare. The skin of the lunar lander was so thin you almost poke a hole in it with a pencil. Every piece of metal that could be removed from the lander was ground away or drilled out in order to make the weight targets. Only the essentials were taken back to Earth. Even crazy, hard to pull off ideas like the Space Elevator are taken seriously if they can get things up and down into orbit for cheap. You are right, we could send a whole fleet of cargo ships ahead. Robotically land them in close formation all ready for the first settlers but it would cost a hell of a lot to do so. This is why the water find on the Moon is so important. Abundant water means free fuel and Oxygen too which makes a moon trip much cheaper. The Moon will only be economical when we find something there that is valuable enough to send it back to Earth or if we can manufacture space craft and satellites there more cheaply than on Earth. Perhaps it will be the extraction of Helium-3 for Fusion reactors.