In reading this article about whether or not there’s money to be made on the moon, I came across this link, with an estimate from about three years ago of the cost of a lunar base.
The numbers seem way high to me, but of course, they’re based on Constellation. But I can never get over the cost estimate for Altair. Twelve billion dollars to develop a lander? How can that possibly be? The only way I can think that they came up with that is to look at the LEM costs in the sixties, and scale them up in both size and current-year dollars. Which is a completely useless way to do it.
On June 21st, 2004, SpaceShipOne made its first journey into space, a test run for the X-Prize-winning flights the following fall. I was there (the top five posts on this page are from Mojave). Jeff Foust has some thoughts on the slower-than-anticipated progress in the industry. Ed Wright and Doug Messier also remember.
But is it really a black swan if it is done purposefully? Of course, with this crowd, it’s hard to tell which consequences are intended and which are inadvertent.
I’d guess that all of Obama’s speeches are archived somewhere. Could someone do a search on them and compare the number of times he’s used the phrase “create jobs” compares to the number of times he’s used the phrase “create wealth”? I’m guessing the number of uses of the latter is approximately, or exactly zero. If so, it will be fodder for a rant on his Marxist tendencies. You can guess the theme. In fact, here’s the Twitter version: You can create jobs without creating wealth, but it’s very hard to do the latter.