Talk:The bad financial reputation of a lunar colony

I completely disagree with my (very cursory) workup as a deleterious line of reasoning. However in the interest of cooperative collaboration I would like to discuss where financial planning belongs on this site before editing this article.

That specific financial considerations should be part of any treatment of lunar colonization ought to be self-evident. Discussion of various technical considerations is interesting and valuable but, to quote the film The Right Stuff:

"Do you know what makes your ships go up? ... Funding."

Initial investment, public and private subsidy, prospects for profitability, short- and long-term ROI and the like cannot be brushed aside as unworthy topics, or as naysaying, or as something that will be worked out "elsewhere" or "some other time." That is pure handwaving.

Financing happens first, before any of the rest of these technical challenges can be surmounted. And in order to talk about finance you have to talk about budgets.

Where should that discussion take place?

There is nothing wrong with having [[Category:Initial Investment]] as a subcategory of [[Category:Finance]]. I deleted the category because the content was not a description of the category but rather a stub article that needed to be in a category. You can see that I was very free with putting my own viewpoint into an article that included your work, you may do the same. We should, in explaining our differences to each other, produce something that fairly represents differing views and informs readers. We are far from insisting on a neutral point of view at Lunarpedia. We are the pro lunar colony/settlement fanatics. We must be aware that others that we want to convince of the wisdom of a lunar colony often consider 0.2% of the world gross annual product to be an exorbitant amount of money. Before spending it on a lunar settlement, they would want to have expert assurance that technically it would work and financially it would annually return a substantial percentage of the investment while presenting reasonably low risk. With the Apollo program people were satisfied with the prestige gained for the price, but did not foresee continuing similar increments of prestige gained for continuing expenditures. To justify further expenditures we should have a convincing argument that there will be a financial return. Since we are in the stage of generating general plans and gathering resource information with no certain profit in the offing, 10 billion dollars a year seems as much as it is reasonable to ask. If this much were dedicated to developing the technology to remotely mine Luna and ship the product to LEO, I think the future would be guaranteed. We would reach a point where we could point to stacks of technical reports showing that space based solar power could return dependable and increasing profits. Then there would be an increase in funding.

If you want to restore [[Category:Initial Investment]], just add it to the bottom of an article that belongs in that category as if it existed. The article will show up with a category link that you can click on to edit. Put [[Category:Finance]] in the edit window and it is hooked up to the tree. There is much unfinished work on this web site that we can get to when we are willing to devote the effort. I would like to try to answer any questions that you have.

Happy editing,

Farred 17:09, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

I should answer the question you asked. We can discuss finance of a moon settlement anywhere. Here is fine or we could start a discussion at the Category talk:Finance page. To start an article with the title that you want, just type in that title into the search field and click the go button. You should be given the option of Creating an article by that title. If you click on that option you go to the edit window and you just enter your text.

Use four tild keystrokes to automatically put your name and the time at the end of your additions to talk pages, like this: "~~~~" - Farred 22:16, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

I hope I did not scare you away by referring to fanatics. A neutral point of view or even an anti moon colony point of view is permitted. All points of view can provide valuable information, but one must expect that on this web site anti moon colony ideas will be followed up by opposing argument.

As for the $10 billion dollar a year budget, there is so much less than that budgeted to analyzing moon colony plans and finding the resources available on the moon that it would take considerable time to ramp up to that rate of spending as a part of NASA's budget. The moon colony activities can make progress on much less.

Farred 22:20, 23 April 2012 (UTC)

Agree!!--Jose Giraldez 06:48, 25 April 2012 (UTC)