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.
Between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (not to mention John Edwards), I have to wonder what it is about Democrats that they are so tolerant of liars as their candidates?
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of liars, Jay Carney gets pretty much everything wrong in his press event. Of course, to be fair, he might actually believe what the other liars are telling him. In which case, he’s not a liar, but an idiot (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
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.