…and 4,609 metric tons of gold ($130 billion) as an impurity.

don’t worry too much about depressing the market, that’s what futures contracts are for.

…and republicans wonder why they lose elections. The people are sick of this two-faced double-standard on government spending that is now blatantly out of control.

“But they’re worse!” when talking about democrats is no damned excuse, and y’all know it.

Technology has overtaken NASA. More importantly,
the wealth available from space exploitation
is a now a national survival issue; Solar power
beamed down from orbit could be used to pay off
a lot of the debt we owe to China, et. al.

Paul of Alexandria (7)
Maybe we should have had commercial space stations and moon bases by now. But where’s the profit incentive?

Please be careful here – that’s not the issue. If there is profit possible, then commercial entitities can find it. We’re starting with tourism, minerals and beamed power may follow.

The main issue is whether the government is obstructing the commercial utilization of space resources or helping it. Right now, the NASA space program is almost purely political. All of the commercial work is going on either at NOAA or DoD.

A secondary point is that space stations and moonbases are places not projects in and of themselves. McMurdo Base in Antarctica doesn’t exist simply to exist, it is there to support scientific exploration.

The government and NASA should be making every effort to develop cheap, reusable launch capabilities, and to open the ISS to commercial operation so that the private entities can find the economic justification for further use.

A very good analogy is the building of the first trans-continential railroad in the U.S. It was partly, if not mostly, subsidized by the government through land grants, because no individual company could otherwise have accomplished the task. It has since, however, paid for itself many times over on the taxes on freight and passengers hauled (AMTRACK aside).

No, it is not. This fetish for heavy lifters is what is preventing us from opening the solar system. What we need is affordable launch, and you don’t get there by spending tens of billions of dollars on something that only flies a few times a year.

Gravity wells are why Mars is a dead end. Space will happen when industrialists figure out how to make a buck up there. Ask yourself this question – what will ever be produced on Mars and sold for a profit on Earth?

The path ahead is to the Moon for H3 and to Earth-crossing asteroids (minimal delta-v) for every element in the periodic table.

Elon Musk will show that access to space can be done for millions, privately, rather than billions via NASA.

And that will change everything.

The proper measure for the cost of movement in space is change in velocity, with deep gravity wells like Earth (or Mars) being the difficult and costly parts, hence the phrase “halfway to anywhere”, referring to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). With SpaceX demonstrating the ability to escape Earth and (hopefully) Bigalow providing cheap, lightweight and voluminous structure, private industry has access to space. And space equals unlimited energy, unlimited resources and no gravity.

LET THE GOLDRUSH* BEGIN!!

* and H3, palladium, platinum, etc.

That argument only holds if you’re spending the energy to go to the asteroids and back, to use the material here on Earth. If I want 10,000 pounds of nickel-iron in LEO though (to make into whatever – but some whatever that’s meant to stay in orbit), it’s a lot easier to get it from the belt than it is to loft it from the surface of the Earth.

Try scaling the problem as one of the energy required to reach the target, not one of the distance. It will be a better yardstick, and SpaceX’s accomplishments will fare very well against anything NASA has been contemplating.