Pardon me while I speculate

All of these posts about space.  What's the point?  Perhaps you can see it as a kind of inspiration.  Where it may lead, who knows.  Perhaps its all just idle speculation.  Just the same, I like doing it.

Having read Mining the Sky, Platinum Moon, and numerous pdf's on the subject of space mining, I am of the opinion that it is mostly a human problem that prevents it.  Some may argue limitation due to economics or technology, but I think that these problems can be surmounted.  No, what the real problem is, is this: how do you get people interested in this as a real possibility and how do you get them to do something about it?

So pardon me while I speculate on how to do this.  Maybe you can have as much fun with reading it as I get from writing about it.  So, here I go again.

Let's look at the Space Shuttle external tank once again.  This is a great resource that got completely wasted in the service life of the shuttle program.  As was shown in my discussion of the NASA pdf, the external tank could have been used to 1) launch and retrieve satellites without rocket power by using tethers 2) melt down metals and manufacture new useful items using concentrated solar power 3) provide ample life support and 4) serve as a more or less permanent space station.  From this discussion, one could use an external tank to incrementally set up a recurring mission to the moon for the purpose of exploiting its resources.  What more would it take to do this?

Let's see:  using a sky hook facility from the space station, you could capture a single stage to orbit vehicle that could bring supplies and crew to the station.  From the station, you could launch missions to the moon, get samples and return to the station.  Then you return finished goods back to Earth along with crew in the same manner they came.  I realize this may not be feasible with modern technology, but why not look into it? If you can do space elevators, then a sky hook should be an easier project, I would think.

Who decides on these missions?  Does NASA decide on its own?  Does the President decide?  Congress? What would it take do this as an experimental mission?  I don't think that it would cost that much.  It might actually be a quite reasonable mission.  Even if it failed, it may yield useful information.  Why not do this?

Update:

The shuttle at liftoff weighed about 5 million pounds.    The orbiter itself fully loaded weighed 240,000 pounds.  The external tank weighed in at 69,000 pounds.  If you count the orbiter and external tank as payload, that's about 300,000 pounds of mass that can be orbited in space.  Or about 150 tons.  Repeat that over a hundred launches of the shuttle and you can see how much of a waste it was.  The point is that they could have had something really humongous up there by now by doing nothing more than launching these things over a hundred times.

Update:

Checked into carbon nanotubes.  They have a way to go yet, so it looks like the tether idea is out for now.  But the tether idea might work in lunar orbit.  Just need to get an ET up there.  Don't know if this is feasible, but guessing that it is.