To create a spacefaring civilization

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Those solutions take too much time therefore increasing the chance of a nuclear holocausst. A nuclear pulse propulsion rocket is the only way to get rid of nuclear weapons quickly and forever.

Nuclear warheads cannot be dismantled. The wires can be cut but the devices can be rewired in minutes. Even if the missles were completely disassembled and the parts destroyed you would still have a mountain of weapons grade plutonium ready for the production of new nuclear weapons. Nuclear pulse propulsion is the only way to get rid of nuclear weapons but you fail to realize that fact because the solution is too complicated. People will eventual make the realization that an atomic bomb cannot be unbuilt but that will only be after the next nuclear holocaust.

Nuclear weapons eventually go back to the factory, Pantex, and are disassembled. The radioactive material goes into storage or gets earmarked for future disposal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex

Now that my friend, is Not going to happen because none of this is commercially lucrative and corporations exist to make a profit and their actions are determined on what is profitable.

Radioactive material can be dumped in the Mariana Trench which is six miles deep. Once down it will never be retrieved.

ruveyn

Exploding the bombs in space is the only way to verify the disposal of nuclear weapons.

We can't tell the future. We don't even know if long-distance space travel is possible. It just seems so possible to us because we grew up hearing all of these ideas about it. What if there are millions of spacefaring civilizations out there, but none of them can reach us?

You don't need to test an interstellar rocket engine to see if it can go 60 million miles per hour.. This is rather done with mathematical calculations and is based on technology we had for the last 40 years.

No. Dumping it in the deepest part of the ocean will do the trick. And such a dump can be witnessed and certified.

It is more economical to use fissile materials in fast breeder reactors. There is very little residual waste.

ruveyn

Or you could throw them into the sun without dismantling them or detonation, assuming you really want to waste money.

But convincing people that it's best to launch hundreds of tons of plutonium through the atmosphere on chemical rockets (which have around a ~1:100 failure rate) may take some doing. Get a good PR firm. And the best lawyer you can afford.

Okay, would the new users stop the harping on about NPP and does anyone have any serious suggestions for a way in which the creation of a self sustaining space industry could be immediately or near immediately profitable to the commercial sector each step of the way so as to make the financing of it possible?

We could harvest energy from the sun and beam it back as electricity.

Caves of Steel, Asimov, also. It Would be more feasible to charge batteries than use a laser.

Well there is the Shackleton Energy Company that wants to start robotic surface ice mining on the Moon with operations start date in 2015. This doesn't involve any human travel to the Moon. It will likely involve tech proven on Mars albeit probably a bit cheaper. The ice in Shackleton crater is believed to be simply sitting there so all it involves is using lasers to cut/burn out 'cubes' of ice and then using a transponder road, bring it back to a rocket fuel factory (also automated). Further chemical launches would be used to get the rocket fuel into space and then shipped to orbital gas stations. Later mass drivers might be used. Chances are they will be using SpaceX for launch and Bigelow for modules. Stone Aerospace itself is a pioneer in deep sea ROV tech so I think they are capable of putting together the required robotics for a lunar operation (where extreme pressure becomes a non-issue)

That's all fine and dandy though but there has to be profit to encourage people to actually use Stone/SEC's facilities. The space tourist industry will certainly help provide funding, and there is already one promotion I am aware of: Win a Trip to Space! :O

VASIMIR being put up into space in 2014 will probably change things. Plans are for it to be mounted on the ISS for station keeping and space testing. Using this kind of engine could make longer distance trips much more feasible. If that is the case it would be more realistic to be able to get to resource-rich asteroid, for example. At the current time it isn't really profitable to spend all the time getting there and trying to teleoperate robotic mining vehicles with a large time delay. But if you can send say 10 people there in a few weeks to stay there in shifts of several months and operate the robots without time delay and with direct oversight it becomes more realistic. And asteroid mining is really the key to space infrastructure. It is simply too expensive to send the material required for, say, a space elevator, into space from Earth.

Better would be to send a small crew on a spacecraft using combined VASIMIR/Solar sails (not unlike the steam/sail hybrids of the early modern period) to a proper material candidate such as a Vestoid-class asteroid. Once there they commence mining to construct mass drivers to propel the asteroid into a very high Earth orbit. For the next few decades semi-automated miners would build 60,000 km of carbon-nanotube wound cable from the asteroid itself, down towards the Earth's surface, where it would 'dock' somewhere in the equatorial regions. Thus Earth would have it's first space elevator and greater amounts of people would be able to go into space cheaply. The remaining asteroid material would probably be used as the counterweight for the elevator

Additionally space plane technology seems to be getting more advanced. Before a cable ever becomes a reality it might be possible that more advanced space planes will be responsible for taking people into LEO where they will board proper space craft.

Asteroids really are the key to space infrastructure. Having excellent semi-autonomous and autonomous robotic mining/manufacturing technology, more advanced carbon nanotube/fullerene technology, VASIMIR-type engines or better, solar sails, and probably space based nuclear-electric power, will also be necessary, just to be able to get out to asteroids. Space planes as well will play an important part. The hollowed out shells of the asteroids could be put into Lagrange points where they could be spun to generate artificial gravity of whatever g you desire

Quoted for awesomeness.