Well, I bought the book and have read it. It is a bit out of date
having been written in 1996. Since that date, water has been
detected on the moon. This makes mining the moon's resources
all that more attractive.
The book doesn't give a specific enough plan that could be followed.
But it does give you enough to go on and allow your own imagination
to fill in the blanks.
The space program as it stands now is very uncertain about its
mission, in my opinion. The only thing that is certain is that there
will be no really big projects in the future, like another Apollo project.
In order to sell a program, it will have to be self supporting. Future
missions in the spirit of how we are doing things now should focus
on the preliminaries toward a large scale mission in the future. This
large scale mission could set up a permanent presence on the moon
in which its resources could be used to support itself.
From there, the moon could be used to expand the concept to the
exploitation of space for economic gain. But that may sound too
capitalistic for some people these days.
10/8/2010 Update: Here's a post about the conference in which the author of the
book "Mining the Sky" will participate. It is on Al Fin's Check it out.
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