With all of Earths nations gaining interest in Asgardia, why don't Global Commerce and Corporations Pay Their Corporate revenue to help fund a colony outside of the earth. As asgardia would give them trade deals in return for guaranteed contracts to build such a colony by way of manufacturing of funding and manufacturing of fittings and materials, as well as a whole host of other services. Simply put we always assume mankind is safe on earth and no rush required. But what if the odds are not as much in our favour as what we'd like to hope that they are. Mankind has been proven wrong many times in the past.

The assumption "mankind is safe" is not a wise one to make or persist with. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/ There's 1773 reasons to think otherwise, just to start. That's unlikely to be half of what's there, and the odds of one hitting us that we haven't seen yet get much higher.

Global commerce and corporations could easily, in combination, fund such an initative, but to put it quite bluntly, why should they, what's in it for them. If their goal was a better life for everyone, they'd be behaving a lot differently now. If their intent was to do something about such a problem they would be already. I predict it to be most difficult to get significant interest. Especially when it comes to paying for things. This sort of project just doesn't generate enough revenue to attract the sort of mind that commonly runs a large corporation.

I do think we can certainly get this done for ourselves, the largest headache being to establish orbital manufacturing and production facilities - it'd all need to be made "up there" with things harvested from "up there", the costs involved with lifting anything significant are extremely restrictive. I personally feel an initiative to start clearing up LEO debris will gather enough material to mostly complete facilities to throw over to the asteroid belt the other side of Mars in order to kickstart the mining operations. The amount of available matter there should more than fuel any initiative we can come up with for some time. And we can be tapping this in decades, with minimal effort.

Because funding.

You ever wondered why many nations of the world don't have their own space programme? Like some of those African countries or some in South America? Mainly because they have barely enough to sustain themselves, let alone think about space exploration. And that isn't just the case with underdeveloped nations. The NASA, ESA, Chinese and Russian space programmes, ISRO are all plagued by one common problem - you guessed it - money. While common people may think of a few million bucks as more than enough funding it's apparently not enough. People would rather have their tax money spent on better on-Earth facilities than on scientific endeavours that barely have 80% chances of fruition.

Secondly, getting to a functional stage requires, besides funding, tech advancements. Before long term space stations capable of sustaining entire populations are built and launched, several other tertiary fields come into play. Material science to design the components, energy science to devise an apt propulsion system, medical science to ascertain effects on humans, and rocket science to get us there.

Let's say we have all that. Funding is apt, materials have been developed and suitable fuel is available. Where do we go from there? We need to build it, man it and shoot it. For all of the above, we need manpower. Willing, enterprising folks who are ready to sacrifice a few things for the betterment of the populace. Supportive citizens and government who don't hinder the process. Experts in respective fields.

These are some of the reasons that come to mind when thinking about this question. (P.S. not being able to do a thing about these makes me feel pissed too)

The easiest way is to solve the problem differently. You can't entirely eliminate funding from the equasion, but you can make it take a lot less - and you can possibly even make it pay for itself completely.

Material science I don't think is an issue on the whole, to assume things like the EM-Drive are pure hype then propulsion systems leave a lot to be desired, but is still something that can be surmounted. Concerns on the subject of medical sciences can be mitigated simply by providing an environment more suitably tailored. Sacrifice isn't a concept that should belong in space, you should have a lot better planning, and not start that which you cannot finish. Experts are easily obtained, many are already in our number. For raw labour capacity, we have that too. The best way to stop citizens "hindering the progress" of the government is to enact a governmental type of "direct democracy" and the citizens then become the government. As this will naturally only be doing what the citizens would want, they are not likely to hinder it.

But back to the task at hand. Realistically, yes using conventional techniques then to ignore everything else, just lifting that sheer mass will be prohibitively expensive. The combined GDP of the top 50 producing countries combined for the next 150 years wouldn't cover it, and fail at about ½way when everything else around it has been collapsed in the attempt. The number of trips it would take and waiting for all the launch sites to line up suitably puts it at a millenia just on that. As a resourceless micronation, this does not represent our greatest overall chances of success.

Realistically, long term "functional" survival in space will depend heavily on much infrastructure - as unfeasible as it is to lift the entire mass from the floor, it's equally unfeasible to be lifting a few tonnes of food every six hours and othersuch. So the logical thing is to establish this infrastructure also in orbit. First, as you'll need it before it can be built afterwards. Sensibly the first things to go up would be manufacturing and recycling facilities and then these can build almost everything else, a lot closer to where it ends up and removing the whole headache of fighting gravity.

These facilities can be developed on the ground, first. Arming thyself with a 3D printer and CNC tooling, a lot of productive capacity becomes instantly available. This should be utilised to refine the equipment to produce to higher tollerances and then both expand it's capacities and capabilities. Specific focus on automation. Then start adding in ability to process/recycle materials. Once such a setup is at the point where it can almost entirely replicate itself, and produce a wide range of products simply from being fed, it can clone a kit for assembly for shipping to lesser fortunate Asgardians. It can also begin to offer it's services to the general public and or private firms in order to pay for it's own operation This can be networked, so as the personal production capacity of Asgardians expand it can be made available in order to utilise the closest machines with requisite capacity to complete production runs, with a percentage returned to the operator for the privlige. Also the more this proliferates, the more kits can be printed - faster - increasing production capacity further.

As it hits a reasonable amount of saturation we can then redo a kit to put into orbit, paid for by whoring the productive capacity of the machines this run could be distributed across the network and printed overnight. Possibly attached to ISS(precise location not an issue) which should be incredibly cheap to achieve(on the scale of it, and the machines might be able to pay for that too - else it'd be a really low per-head cost) armed with a few "tugs" that can start towing in LEO debris to feed it. Some of this cleanup operation can generate revenue, which should offset any fuel costs of it's operation if done sensibly. If fuel costs apply, I do think the EM-Drive works. With minimal "consumable" input it should be able to clone a few more tugs to speed up the overal operation and expand itself a little, then clone off a copy of itself with mining additions and a couple of centrafugal launchers. The launcher can throw a few tugs past Mars to start "catching" things - a week or so later the freshly cloned facilty and a week or so later the other centrafugual launcher. This should open up viability to not only begin mining the asteroid belt the other side of Mars, where there is more than enough resources for constructing everything we should need for some time, with things in place to begin constructing more mining equipement closer to where the resources are being mined in order to mine faster. Exponentially faster.

As resources come back this way, we can keep 40% in orbit, and sell 60% to Earth to fund other initatives, and lifting anything we still need to. As mining facilities expand and resources get sent back faster, that 40% will rapidly become more than we can use, and everything should already be in orbit to start using that 40% to build yet more infrastructure that will complete a few holes left in our productive capacities and begin structural component productions for some more expected facilities, like orbital farms, conventional and energy.

By offloading energy and food productions away from main habitations you end up with a more scalable architecture. And should make it a lot easier to provide for redundancies. As these unfold and the general capacity is "waste" this can also be sold to Earth to fund other initatives. As farm saturations reach sensible levels then component production of habitational facilities should ensue - by this stage the capacity of our orbital production facilities should be of a scale to be able to make several of these habitational stations for deployment at the same time in around a decade or so after component production starts. Construction should be possible to entirely automate, but human labour can be definitely reduced to at most a few small teams, who are basically putting together macroscale lego blocks.

Because the costs of getting any type of facility in to orbit that makes use of current building materials to construct, are higher than what is realistically affordable currently. We will need lighter stronger building materials and a more affordable way of reaching space whether that be a space elevator or more efficient propulsion systems than what we currently have

Even with lighter materials, the sheer mass required to be lifted makes such thinking as unfeasible as a space elevator. The baloon idea made more sense, and they tend to pop at a certain height as the lack of pressure on the outside provides less resistence and leads to rupture.

Definitely need "better" propulsion systems than those currently available commercially. An electrical lift method may render lifting megatonnes feasible to afford, and to occur in less than a few thousand years. But it'd still be faster being used to lift mining equipment and developing space manufacturing capacity, because unless you're planning on constantly lifting from the Earth ad infinitum then that's pretty much required anyway.

Um, whut?

I assume that means use a baloon and once you make it into vacuum use thrusters? If so, then the baloon is likely to pop well before vacuum - well before you've left the mesosphere most likely. But that is just under ½ way to the Kármán line. This should make it "easier" to get the rest of the way, in theory. Something small from this point could have a reasonable power/wieght ratio and thusly travel the rest of the distance with relative ease, and reduced cost.

I'm still not overly clear on the operating principles... "Vacuum baloon"? a "baloon" of vacuum - nothing weighs less so should "float"...

With regards to "space-tube" - to assume something along the lines of Musk's "hyperloop", but more "up", then there's all the "space elevator" issues in play with regards to wind, resonance, weight distribution etc and to hit "hard vacuum" it'd need to be 850km or so long - to maintain vaccum in the "tube" on anything shorter would require an airlock, and therefore stopping.

yo veo Que No Estamos Tomando en Cuenta las Tecnologías Nuevas, ni TAMPOCO Que CIVILIZACIONES  hay afuera , Que sabemos Que no son ningún mito

Who knows? maybe Asteroid mining will become a big thing and than BOOM people will be in space everywhere.