Lol?
An unmanned probe to fucking alpha centauri in 100 years? You have any fucking idea of how absurd is that?

The main reason is that you have to develop an engine that does not suck balls first.

That's plain idiotic. With the same money you could fill the whole fucking moon with platoons of prospecting bots, and if lucky enough, start a relatively profitable teleoperated mining operation by having Uncle Sam paying for start-up costs.
Still a total murderous ripoff, but for a much better reason.

I'd say keep funnelling money to SpaceX and hope they deliver, and then focus on fixing and maintaining orbital satellites for a while (they cost billions and there are loads of them that could use some help for the right price), again having Uncle Sam swallow the start-up and development costs (minusucule if compared to the STS, but who cares).

Then proceed with the moon as above with the money from orbital mainteneance services.

That's not true at all.

Those bombs don't just drop themselves, but come at the end of a sophisticated aerospace logistics train that has received far more investment and physics and engineering expertise in the past decades than the space program. It is responsible for dramatic advances in electronics, sensors, materials and engines, not to mention those achievements with less carry-over but which are nonetheless impressive, like radar stealth.

That's like saying that the space program produces no R&D because that is all done before anything enters space. (which, in both cases, is not even strictly true)

The purpose of military development is to fight wars. The only thing not known is who specifically will be fought.

God...you really don't understand that fighting a war does not, in fact, help the economy?

Military R&D brings economic and technological benefits until the first shot is fired, at which point you're doing nothing but spending money and resources on the damn munitions.

That's not what Keynes told me!

Like how space research brings economic and technological benefits until you actually launch a spaceship. You don't need to do that to just develop and build one.

Nb: not even strictly true in either case; the use is often the only way of really testing it.

Also, I didn't say that either was net beneficial economically, just that they had similar effect. They're basically the same industry!

I mean, nobody invented Velcro, Tang, Microprocessors, or inertial guidance systems for going to the moon. Those things already existed, they just made them better or implemented them in new ways. So if there is a benefit from space-research, it's probably not going to come out of the vehicles used to get there.

Even a nuclear powered spaceship may indeed not be buildable to that spec on 50,000t, but it isn't totally beyond the realm of possibility either.

Not really. At least my idea is cool; yours will just lose money for no gloire.

Ignoring the question, which was not "What is the most efficient way to run the space program?" but "What would you do with 50,000t to orbit?".

Government investment allowed contractors to gain experience and eventually roll out inertial systems into the commercial market.

Anyways, back on topic, how much factory equipment could we heft up there to start assembling an Island 3?

The only thing that I'd point out is that any kind of government-backed R&D tends to have this effect, apart for some military stuff that gets classified.
I mean, as long as it's Ol'Sam paying for stuff, does not matter what is being done exactly, but advances will be made.

Except for the small part of the equation where spacecraft build infrastructure and provide scientific return, instead of BLOWING UP infrastructure and killing people. When you space R&D results in launches, you get satellites, remote probes or manned missions, all of which provide economic or scientific benefits.

Dropping bombs on Afghan villages builds nothing. Quite the opposite, actually. And if you need to get into a real, total war...well, let's just say you're not going to be able to do a whole lot of science or economic activity afterwards.

We aren't talking "common" nuclear power here (fission), you need fusion engines for the very least (albeit i'm still much more positive about relativistic sailbots and a magnetic pusher plate) and a way to ensure your highly advanced and complex shit does not fuck up horribly for 100 years of continued operation.

Ok, you may manage to make it mass less than 50 ktons but hell, I don't understand the point of your speculation if you can pull out that awesomeness from the hat.

Bullshit. Your idea will crash and burn the second the will for it ceases, and become "something cool that we cannot sadly do anymore" for the future generations. Like any space program did in the past. If you said "I wanna make a Moon Hotel for the Wealthy", it would have looked much better.

If it does make some kind of money it will keep going on regardless of your will, and eventually lead to cost reductions for everything else. Which means, I want to make sure someone will eventually build a truly permanent moon base in the future (mainly a turist hotel, probably), not will stuff into existence that will disappear/wither-and-die whenever i leave the chair.

I'm fairly sure of reading about an orion concept that would do it. ofc orion is itself a speculative venture, but not an impossible one.

The problem with space mining is it won't make any money and also isn't cool.

Blowing up, blowing into space, whatever.

The probes and manned missions don't produce economic benefits. Scientific, maybe, but that's equivocation.

When you space R&D results in launches, you get satellites, remote probes or manned missions, all of which provide economic or scientific benefits.

Your interpretation of the usefulness of war is also loaded with value judgments; destroying afghan mud huts may be net-beneficial economically if it kills people who would otherwise have destroyed much more valuable infrastructure in the US. Who is to say this is not more useful than 100 different TV channels? (btw, comms are almost entirely ground-based fibre now, and all the sat phone companies went bankrupt, while GPS was built for military purposes!)

Not necessarily. Most of the cost of the Shuttle program was in the wages of the people working at it (which where a lot, a lot more than for a conventional rocket). Which was more or less a fixed cost. The more launches you make the more you can split the fixed costs, the less is the cost-per-launch.

For example, the reusable solid boosters started making economic sense only with more than X flghts per year, and this X was something like 15 or 20 or some number the Shuttle never came close.

If ever there was a Golden Age for the space shuttle program, that period was 1984 to Challenger. In those two years there were a total of fifteen successful shuttle missions, ten of those coming in the final twelve months. The shuttle would never again achieve that flight rate. ... The missions were coming so fast that shuttles were simultaneously being readied for launch on pads 39-A and -B.

...

On the surface things looked glorious for NASA. But there was a problem: Getting to the twenty-plus missions per year that would give the shuttle a cost-competitive advantage over other launch systems was proving to be a much more formidable task than expected. The shuttle was a voracious consumer of man-hours. After every landing there were thousands of components that needed to be inspected, tested, drained, pressurized, or otherwise serviced. There were 28,000 heat tiles and thermal blankets on the vehicle. Each one had to be inspected. Mission-specific software had to be developed and validated. Payloads had to be installed and checked out. Severely hampering every turnaround was the lack of spare parts. Just-landed orbiters were being cannibalized of their main engines and other components to get the next shuttle ready. The necessary requirement to meticulously document all work was another drag on vehicle turnarounds: Just tightening a screw generated multiple pieces of paperwork. The joke within the astronaut corps was a space shuttle could not be launched until the stacked paper detailing the turnaround work equaled the height of the shuttle stack... two hundred feet.

At just ten missions per year the shuttle was driving the system to its knees. The message was the same everywhere: "I need more people. I need more equipment. I need more spare parts." But NASA didn't have the money to buy these things. While commercial customers offset a portion of the expense, the cash flow was nowhere close to making the shuttle the pay-as-you-go enterprise promised years earlier to Congress. Significant taxpayer money was needed to underwrite the program, and those funds were fixed in the budget. The launch rate had to be doubled with the funds available. The end result was that more was being demanded of the existing manpower and equipment to achieve a higher flight rate. Everybody had a story about how this was overwhelming the various NASA teams. I recall being with an MCC controller when his boss brought in more work for him. The controller objected, "I haven't had a day off in six weeks. My wife and kids don't know who I am." The supervisor was sympathetic but had no other option. "We're all in the same boat. I don't have anybody else. You've got to do it." I could see it in both of their faces. They were exhausted, totally burned out. And they weren't the exception. In many areas NASA only had a first string. There was no "bench" to call on for substitutes. One of our STS-41D prelaunch hangar tests of Discovery had been botched for that reason. The first string had been supporting the pad checkout of the shuttle being readied for the next launch, so the contractor had scraped together a team for us from God-only-knew-where. One of the technicians had apparently been called from home because he arrived in the cockpit with the smell of alcohol on his breath. It was an outrageous violation and Hank Hartsfield confronted the man's supervisor about it. He apologized for the intoxicated worker as well as for the entire test debacle, adding, "I don't have enough people to cover everything."

...

An October 1, 1985 , interoffice Thiokol memo contained this plea: "HELP! The [O-ring] seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means." In his last paragraph, the memo's author, R.V. Ebeling, obliquely highlights the major problem of the operational STS... not enough people. "The allegiance to the O-ring investigation task force is very limited to a group of engineers numbering 8-10. Our assigned people in manufacturing and quality have the desire, but are encumbered with other significant work." He finished the memo with the warning, "This is a red flag."

Another indication of the crushing workload being borne by the Thiokol engineers is found in an October 4, 1985, activity report by Roger Boisjoly. "I for one resent working at full capacity all week long and then being required to support activity on the weekend ..." The operational shuttle program was devouring people.