"Although helium 3 would be very exciting," says Bryan Palaszewski, leader of advanced fuels at NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, "first we have to go back to the moon and be capable of doing significant operations there." [QUOTE]

Tourism is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to benefits from space. Efforts to create a scramjet that could take off like an airplane, achieve escape velocity and then land like an airplane could revolutionize our own aerospace industry and make space tourism very affordable. But the quantity of metals in the solar system could also prove vital to industry in space, or perhaps even for inustry on the ground if a tether system is ever developed.

I have frequently been alerted to the idea of collecting sunlight on the moon and reflecting it to earth. I don't know if that can really work or not, or what affect that would have on the atmosphere of earth, but it should be studied and tested. That is why it is so important for Bush's space exploration plan to take affect. There are many many ideas people have for the moon and they need to be tested to see which ideas can be made to work in the short term and which ideas will take longer to implament, or which ideas are totally unrealistic.