In The Future, Astronauts Could Print Out Their Moon Bases en-us Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500 Sat, 15 Mar 2014 14:43:00 -0400 Dina Spector joseph1234566789987652 Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:41:24 -0500 also we dont need to turn space into a trillion dollar economy" theres enough recource in the solarsystem for us ALL to live, FREE and money less. there is endless fresh water and valuable but more so "USEFUL material, we dont need to collect or extract it for money but for the benefit of everyone everywhere. the freedom. the advancement and new way of thinking. joseph123456789776543 Tue, 05 Feb 2013 05:37:22 -0500 excellent. Daniel Glenn Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:54:24 -0500 Space is a 300 billion a year industry. NASA is 17 billion of that. The ESA and Russia do NOT make up the balance. The founders at Google and others have begun talking about turning space into a trillion dollar economy. 3-D printing will be the enabling technology to do this. As for 'basic research,' I'm not sure you do get it. The simple fact that we are engineering these sorts of projects leads to some incredible advances that would not have been made in as timely a manner as they have been. For example, what happened when they launched Hubble? It was broke! Did that stop them from collecting data? No. They collected fuzzy data and developed a computer program to make it useful. A medical doctor came by and looked at what they did and said "Wow! That's exactly what I do when examining for breast cancer" The technology was better at finding breast cancer than the trained human eye. THOUSANDS OF LIVES SAVED. At NASA, that sort of thing happens all the time. No where else do you have such a diverse collection of Scientists, medical researchers, medical doctors, and Engineers of all types. These are the people who make tomorrow come. Put them together and tell them to build a moon base, and there is no telling what they will come up with. Self-replicating robots could be just the beginning... Kegan Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:50:38 -0500 H newworldorder Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:33:48 -0500 How do we make money on the Moon? Could you please review that for us? I get the part about Basic Research but after 40+ years do we see any monetizable economic factors on the Moon? Space Operas aside I mean. jinqian0529 Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:19:40 -0500 I guess the cost can be very high