Proud and sad to be an American today!

[Mattl]

It was something else seeing the last flight of discovery. I'm proud of all we accomplished, disappointed that the program has ended, with no known replacement in place.

 

[Jim Logajan]

The same expenditure of energy will take a given piece of mass to moon and all the planets. They are "equidistant" with regard to energy requirements.

Low earth orbit is more than half way to the rest of the solar system - again on the launch energy requirements scale.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Without the space shuttle we will be unable to travel to the stars where we can speak to English speaking Vulcans, Klingons, and Romulans.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Why would you want to speak to the Romulans?

They have cute ears and pretty pictures painted on their starships.

 

[Jim Logajan]

For a 5 light years distance total path loss at 1 GHz is 367dbs

Sounds about right. Going to ~100 Hz might improve things quite a bit, though.

To receive on Earth a signal equivalent to GPS (-130dbm) (equivalent to noise floor) the source would need to produce 100 billions of 1billion watts. To put it in perspective the average nuclear power station produces 1000 Megawatts. It would require 100 billion nuclear power plants to generate such power.

That high wattage output doesn't have to be continuous. Consider a charged capacitor that is suddenly shorted through a wire - the power output can be very high. For example, Sandia Labs can generate x-ray pulses of over 200 trillion watts. With modest generators they could send a morse code message using x-rays at reasonable speeds.

I think your premise of continuous output has lead you astray.