Space Islands - with those kinds of costs?

The spacejumper (flymetothemoon) association initiative is about bringing as many people as far away up in space as cheap as possible. What we can do to help make it happen.
For the time being cost is what is holding us back!
Nomatter how fascinating people think spaceexploration is, somehow enthusiasm cools when the costs are listed. e.g. Nasa audit:

For fiscal year 2000, NASA calculated an average cost per launch of $759 million based on four shuttle launches. Thus, for the four space station assembly flights charged against the limit, approximately half of NASA’s calculated costs ($379 million per launch or $1.5 billion in total) are not reflected in NASA’s fiscal year 2000 accounting. Although NASA capitalized shuttle-related costs for the space station at $441 million per flight in its audited fiscal year 2000 financial statements, NASA officials stated that its more recent calculation of $759 million per launch more closely reflects actual cost.

What we need is to get the cost down!
Especially if are ever going to see a lot of islands in space

And lots of people living in space:


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With a pricetag of $100 million to bring a tourist to the the moon - it is still way to costly - but it is start -

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The Guardian also reported on the $100 million plan to kickstart it all:

Russia's federal space agency took a giant leap in the field of cosmic tourism yesterday with the announcement it will offer a $100m (£57m) trip to the moon.
Roskosmos leaked details of the project as Nasa's space shuttle Discovery prepared for launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. A source at the Russian agency confirmed to the Guardian that the technology was in place for a flight to be launched within 18 months of a down payment
The fortnight-long trip would include a week at the International Space Station (ISS) before blasting off to the moon and completing a full orbit 100 miles above its surface.
The only two space tourists so far, American Dennis Tito and South African Mark Shuttleworth, got no further than the ISS for $20m each and no Russian cosmonaut has ever orbited the moon.

A single tourist accompanied by one astronaut could go on each trip in a modified Soyuz-TMA capsule to be launched from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

"The tourist would go up in that capsule and spend the first week on the ISS," said the Roskosmos source. "Then a powerful booster like Proton would be launched from Earth with an accelerator block to dock with the craft at the space station."

That accelerator block - basically, an engine with fuel tanks - would then be used to propel the spacecraft towards the moon.

The Soviet Union sent the first unmanned probe to land on the moon in 1959. It came close to launching
a manned flight to the moon but dropped its programme when the Americans got there first a decade later.

Space tourists will not land on its surface but will circle its dark side and orbit close enough to examine its cratered lunar crust. They would live in two cramped modules about three metres across and eat biscuits and food in tubes.

Any candidate for the expedition would have to undergo several months of intensive training at Star City near Moscow.

It is thought the flight to the moon would be a commercial exercise to raise funds for the cash-strapped Roskosmos. Russia's space programme has about a tenth of Nasa's budget and has been struggling to finance the ISS in the absence of the US space shuttle fleet.

A trip to the moon poses far greater technical risks and danger than a relatively short flight to the ISS. The space station is only 220 miles from the Earth's surface in low orbit whereas the moon is almost 240,000 miles away and would take about three days to reach.

But Vitaly Golovachyov, a space analyst at the Trud newspaper, said the mission was realistic. "We've had the necessary technology for many years," he said. "The only problem will be finding someone prepared to pay that much."

Many Russians maintain a fierce pride in the country's legacy of space exploration, which reached its pinnacle when Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space in 1961.

American and Russian astronauts were meeting in the Russian capital yesterday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission which soothed tensions between the two superpowers at the height of the cold war.

· China will put a woman in space no later than 2010, the China Daily reported yesterday. The world's third country to put a man into space would start choosing pilots, scientists and engineers for its first wave of female astronauts next year.

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БЕЗУМЕН (translated = crazy)

But we have to start somewhere! :-)