Monday, September 19, 2005

Nasa plans return to Moon by 2020

An article on the BBC today gave a broad outline of what NASA is planning to do to meet with the Presidential goals set out last year and I've got to say that it's a good thing to see that they're not just bumbling along at status quo. But I do have to question a few things, how could a new shuttle program cost $104 billion dollars? That's absurd, private ventures could probably colonize half the planets in this sytem and still turn a profit somehow. I'm starting to wonder if the space program shouldn't be a bit more privatized and business like. I understand the need for testing and safety but look at the communications companies and pharmasutical companies that somehow manage to turn a profit yet still work with new technologies, ones that we've come to rely on very heavily.

A bit of business acument could yield far better results if you ask me. Putting a base on the moon is a great idea, set up a series of labs and then rent them out to companies that require vacumes or moon like environments for testing or even production. Think of the possibilities that space could bring; if you set up a section of a moon base as a tourist section you could control the safety of bringing people there and use the funding to pay for further expansions rather than using tax payer dollars.

It only took $20 million to get the x-prize winner into space, I can't see what would cost so much that it would cost $104 billion to make a series of reusable shuttles for space missions. Hell for that much money you could build a galactic fleet and a few bases on anything hard enough to attach a base to in our solar system. I guess this is part of the beauty of burocracies.