Eric Berger reports on yesterday’s fossilized discussion of human spaceflight, that included no discussion whatsoever of commercial capabilities.
Age aside, no one has ever adequately explained to me why Tom Young, who has no experience with human spaceflight, is always invited to these things.
Day after day
Politicians on the hill
Trick the space community with a foolish grin…
Shelby’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Living in the age of Space Oddities,
sung on the YouTube screen
while floating in peculiar ways,
never knowing what’s going on from day to day,
so many hashtags giving
inspiration that younger generations hopes are hung
and congress, maw agape like a crocodile
threaten devour the whole endeavor
and leave us stranded in LEO forever.
A billion dollars used to be a lot of money. If you’re doing things wrong, any amount would be inadequate.
NASA has an annual human spaceflight budget of about $8.4 billion.
That would just about buy SpaceX. So one year of NASAs budget is about equal to 15 years of a successful company.
In reality, most people that follow Rand could probably get to mars in ten years with a one billion annual budget, I’d do it for half that.
For that budget, I’d have hardware in orbit and making unmanned lander attempts on mars in less than two years (assuming FH is ready this year.)
OK but now you have to say it in the form of free verse poetry.
I though hard about it, but realized I didn’t have it in me at the time.
I had the same thought reading this. $8.4 billion, while making maximum use of commercial partners? Hell yes, I could get a man-tended base on the Moon in under a decade. And probably a good deal more. (And yes, you could probably do something around Mars in the same time span, too.)
But SLS and Orion simply suck up all the money in the room.
There’s enough money in the NASA budget to do worthwhile HSF things. But not with the P.O.R.