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.