RE: Why your kids won't land on the Moon
Some realism here. I'd suggest you get hold of Wallace Stegner's fine biography of John Wesley Powell. As Stegner makes abundantly clear, the only entity that could ever have gotten the Western US settled was the Federal government. Why? The public did not have the resources to build the sort of monumental water works that allow human settlement in this part of the world. All attempts to build those works using private investment failed, and failed miserably.The absurdist notions of Ronald Reagan and his friends aside, there are certain projects that can only be undertaken by government. Is that a good thing? Here in the West it depends on how you feel about such things as overpopulating deserts, sucking up all the fossil water, and salting over at least a few hundred thousand acres of prime farmland. It's done now, but the point is only the Feds could have event attempted it, that's why capital went, hat in hand, to DC to get it done. Thus has it been forever, right to this day. The people with the money go as far as they can, then they get the mega-machine involved to finish the job.
In short, that's why there won't be any private investment to get us to the moon anytime soon. I can see individual nations, or a consortium of the same doing it. But without all our taxpayer dollars footing the bill, it isn't going to happen. And as the first poster mentions, there may just be more pressing needs at this point.
