On Oct 27, 8:35 pm, Matt wrote:
On Oct 27, 9:59 pm, BradGuth wrote:





On Oct 27, 8:42 pm, macruzq wrote:

On Oct 27, 10:06 pm, "Jonathan" wrote:

First Bush and his Vision to the moon, then Japan, India
and now China all gearing up to go back to the moon.

WHY?

The same reason for Apollo, we were in a ....military...race
with the Soviets. The Cold War. Now....the reason everyone
is going back to the moon???

MISSILE DEFENSE.

So, I guess after another FIFTY GODDAMMED YEARS
we'll end up with nothing more to show than the last
FIFTY YEARS IN SPACE.

Lots of really cool..very..expensive weapons we'll probably
never use. And a bunch of completely useless hardware
lying about on the moon.

Just like the ISS, the Grand Accomplishment of the last
FIFTY YEARS in space.

What a ****ing... excuse my lanquage, but it's so incredibly
infuriating to think about, no other word will do....
..what a ****ing waste.

Hey, hey! Calm down! Moon is TOO FAR to launch a missile. It is not
practical. Missiles or any weapons installed on the Moon is simply a
stupid idea.

But as easily deployed from the moon's L1 isn't exactly half bad.
- Brad Guth -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Interceptor missiles launched from the moon or L1 would take hours to
reach near-Earth space - that's hopelessly too slow to affect a
ballistic missile attack from one point on Earth to another. Lasers or
other directed energy beams would spread too much at that range. No
one will put offensive missiles in such places, either: the enormous
effort of hauling the things up there is worthless given that a war
using Earth-based ballistic missiles will be over before missiles
needing (at best) hours to reach Earth can have any effect.

I agree, but a tethered platform of those nifty gigaWatt laser cannons
could rather easily be established to reach within 2r of Earth, and in
space there's not all that much beam divergence. Besides, a swarm of
nuclear warheads as incoming from the moon's L1 would be next to
impossible to divert or kill off any sufficient number before it's too
late, especially since many of those items could be of dirt cheap
phony decoys (perhaps made in China or India).

Actually, the fly-by-rocket task of getting loads of nifty stuff into
the moon's L1 orbit isn't all that spendy, especially if you're not in
any hurry for getting stuff there in the first place.
- Brad Guth -