The idea in short

So let’s just get to it. To advance our species to the next step, I will need to build a way to move to and from planet Mercury. Why Mercury? It’s the closes planet to the sun. On the surface it can soar to eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit in sun. That’s what I’m after! Energy! With various thermal energy to electricity method’s I can extract this energy. What about solar panels? Well maybe but with all the pure heat readily accessible I don’t see a need. With a virtually unlimited supply of energy nothing will be impossible.  The problem is how to get there. One craft that goes from earth to Mercury sounds like the way to go right? Wrong! I need to build a transport system in stages. First is getting off this rock.

To get off earth I would employ a dual Zeppelin craft. Two zeppelins attached to make a floating launch pad for jets. Not rockets. The jets would need less fuel to get to an altitude where they can launch personnel and supplies into low earth orbit with rockets. Slowly from this infrastructure a real space station will be built. One made explicitly to be way station between earth and mercury. In space I will build several ships. Each ship will have a specific purpose. Food cultivation, repairs, spare parts, Mercury base construction equipment, equipment to build another space station orbiting Mercury and so on. These ships would use sever high powered large ion propulsion engines, with backup rockets. I will build a redundant ship for every type. Once the space fleet in complete I off and hopefully some nut cases decided to join me.