7 thoughts on “The Rocket Scientists On The Hill”

  1. 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.

  2. 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.)

    1. 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.

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