re: Inspiring, but is it practical?
Expense is a relative term. Spaace Advocates have to start think in terms of todays global economy where a billion is not much money anymore. Remember the Gross World PRoduct is around 50 Trillion dollars, with the U.S. share around 12 trillion or so.
Over the next twenty years NASA plans to spend about $100 billion of the $320 billion cumlative funding it will receive in its next 20 annual budget cycles to return to the Moon.
NASA is going to spend 7.5 billion designing and building its fleet of CEVs.
Airbus is going to spend 13 billion designing the A350.
ExxonMobile's profits this year will be over $30 billion dollars.
So really the costs are not all that great.