Word: solarity
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...Today," Bush said last week before an audience of jump-suited astronauts and NASA scientists, "I announce a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system...
...have gone too far in the other direction. The funding he has offered the program so far is just $1 billion spread out over the next five years, plus a reallocation of $11 billion already in the NASA budget--hardly adequate cash for a nation planning to settle the solar system...
...good reason to go is the one disdained by straight-to-Mars boosters: learning how to live off the land--manufacturing some of what we need from soil that contains oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium and titanium, plus a dusting of helium, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon deposited by solar winds...
...some dreamers, the presence of silicon, especially, suggests a way to make a return to the moon pay--and maybe even save the environment back home. If you could set up automated lunar factories to extract the silicon and turn it into solar cells, says David Criswell, director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston, the moon could become a solar power station, beaming clean energy via microwaves back to Earth. "If you want to provide sustainable energy for 10 billion people by 2050," he says, "there is no other...
...fact that solar power isn't yet cost effective on Earth makes this high-tech scenario seem a bit farfetched. The same goes for another energy-producing idea: extracting helium-3, an isotope rare on Earth but relatively abundant on the lunar surface, and shipping it back to fuel nuclear-fusion power plants. First, though, somebody would have to demonstrate that fusion reactors actually work...