In a world that worked according to Winn, space development would go like this:
Driven by popular consensus, against which any other action would be political suicide, our gutsy representatives in Washington would slash military spending and entitlements to free up money for the construction of a fleet of Orion-class nuclear pulse heavy lifters (See The Point Loma Legacy). Simultaneously, they would create a research organization on the scale of the Manhattan Project to implement moon mining and electromagnetic mass driver technology for the extraction of oxygen, hydrogen and construction materials from the lunar surface.
Using the heavy lifters only once, then leaving them in space as construction shacks, crews would build the first mining operations, habitats and cargo transportation systems following plans laid out by the Space Studies Institute at Princeton.
Within fifteen years, a population of at least 10,000 would be living and working on the moon and in Trojan orbit, sustaining themselves without resupply from home and providing the following services to earth in payment for luxury imports:
- Space solar power for the developed and developing countries at a cost roughly equal to hydropower, but without the need for dams or long-distance transmission lines. (Note: The latter is especially important in developing areas where the infrastructure for power transmission is not in place, prohibitively expensive, or both.)
- Cheap satellites -- Communications satellites, weather satellites, resource mapping, locator and messaging satellites at a small fraction of their current cost, because they would be set in place and maintained by space workers rather than launched from earth at high cost and low reliability.
- Cleanup of orbital debris which, at this time, can and do endanger space operations.
- Collision insurance. In the remote possibility one of the big rocks we haven't discovered yet paints a bull's-eye on our home planet, humanity will stand a better chance of discovering it in time, acting successfully or, at least, surviving in part.
- Global policing. Protected and guided by orbiting infrastructure supported from the moon rather than from earth, and thus made relatively cheap, a small conventional force can police the planet. A five-pound rock dropped from orbit can take out an aircraft carrier. A larger rock can level a buried command center. From orbit, using large optics manufactured with high precision in freefall, reconnaissance teams can make sure that almost nothing moving on the ground, in the air, on or under the sea escapes detection.
