Posted on 03/22/2004 4:35:45 PM PST by anymouse
There is an old children’s game that teachers occasionally inflict upon their students as a morality play. A group of children are placed in a circle and then one of them is told a story that they are to whisper to the person to their right. That child is supposed to whisper it to the person on their right and so on until they reach the originator, by which time it no longer resembles the original story. Distortions are introduced by miscommunication or deliberate fraud. The lesson is that you should not believe everything you hear.
We saw the modern media version of this game recently when rumors emerged that President Bush was about to unveil a new space policy that called for a return to the Moon and an eventual human mission to Mars. Media reports quickly declared that this plan would cost a trillion dollars or even more. That number was widely repeated within the modern media echo chamber, often by supposedly reputable sources. It may have already done substantial damage to the Bush space policy, creating public opposition to what is perceived as a massively expensive program and scaring away any possible supporters.
The $1 trillion cost estimate is wrong. It is based upon a completely inaccurate reading of historical data and deeply flawed mathematics. But the problems are worse than this. Not only was an inaccurate number repeated endlessly by the media without confirmation, but the flawed calculations were repeated again and again by various people with their own agendas. Reporters also appear to have ignored or evaded obvious weaknesses with the original source of the information, preferring to repeat an inaccurate number that they saw repeated endlessly rather than seek out better information. The story of the $1 trillion cost estimate raises some troubling questions about how modern journalism is conducted. The birth of a number
There was no secret that the Bush administration was formulating a new space policy in the fall of 2003. However, the details of the policy were shrouded in secrecy until a January 7 article carried by wire service United Press International. That article reported that President Bush would unveil his new space plan the following week and provided a few details, some of which were later proven false. The story contained some budgetary figures indicating that large increases in the NASA budget would not occur, but did not provide an overall budget figure for the plan. It also made clear that a return to the Moon, not a human mission to Mars, was the primary emphasis of the new plan.
On January 8 Paul Recer of the Associated Press reported on the new space plan. In his article, Recer stated: “No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly $1 trillion, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a Moon colony, again, would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface.” Note that according to Recer, the trillion-dollar figure is only for a single Mars expedition, not for both the Moon and Mars, which the UPI story stated were part of the new plan. Outside observers could naturally assume that a plan for both Moon and Mars missions would be more expensive than a Mars mission alone.
I was able to contact Recer on March 4 and ask him where he had gotten the $1 trillion cost estimate for a human mission to Mars. Recer stated that he had gotten the information from “industry sources and people I talked to.” He said that none of the information was provided by government sources. He said that his sources told him that in 1989 Congress—not NASA—had produced an estimate of $400-$500 billion for a mission to Mars as proposed by President George H.W. Bush. Recer had adjusted for inflation, which would have produced a range of $640-$800 billion. He had then rounded up by at least $200 billion to produce the estimate of “nearly $1 trillion.”
There were major problems with these conclusions. In 1989 President George H.W. Bush had indeed proposed a Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) that included both a Moon base and a human mission to Mars. NASA initially estimated the total cost for both of these efforts at approximately $400 billion over 30 years. The cost of the Mars mission alone was $172.9 billion, plus $13.85 billion for precursor probes, or a total of $186.75 billion. The lunar base was estimated to cost $209.46 billion. By late 1989, using slightly different baseline assumptions, NASA had produced another cost estimate of $541 billion for 34 years of lunar and Mars operations, also roughly split in half. After this, the media often reported that the costs of Bush’s plan were either $400-$500 billion, or $400-$550 billion. Often the press erroneously reported that these costs were for a single mission to Mars, rather than for thirty years or more of operating bases on both the Moon and Mars. (See “Aiming for Mars, grounded on Earth: part one” February 16, 2004)
The Space Exploration Initiative received no significant funding and was completely dead within three years. But the huge cost estimates acquired a sort of permanence, in part because they were easily accessible via a search of media reports using such tools as the LEXIS/NEXIS search engine. Reporters on deadline will often do their research by looking at what other reporters have written. Few people, particularly reporters, have the inclination to ask whether those media reports themselves were accurate and to search out the original information. For instance, it was widely—and incorrectly—reported in the early 1990s that these large costs estimates were only for a human mission to Mars, a mistake that Recer and others repeated over a decade later.
These $400-$541 billion cost estimates had many problems even in 1989. For starters, SEI was an extremely ambitious program that called for a permanent lunar base almost from the start of operations. It projected costs not only for the initial goals, but also for decades of operations. The plan also included many other projects that were not necessary for the President’s goal. There was no reason that the plan had to include all of the assumptions or elements that NASA used in its estimates. There were also dubious parts to in the plan, such as a totally unrealistic space shuttle flight rate.
There is no viable way to adapt these numbers to current day space exploration proposals, because the cost estimates were based upon ways of doing things that NASA no longer uses. For instance, the robotic Mars missions preceding human flights would have used expensive Titan 4 rockets and the spacecraft themselves would have been expensive. However, NASA switched its Mars and other planetary missions to cheaper Delta 2 rockets in the 1990s and adopted the “faster cheaper better” philosophy where missions cost only about $250 million apiece, rather than the billion-dollar missions proposed in the late 1980s. Some of the projects proposed for the Space Exploration Initiative have already been accomplished, and do not need to be done again. In addition, all SEI transportation costs were based upon using the space shuttle and shuttle-derived launch vehicles rather than cheaper alternatives. Simply put, the 1989 estimates are not applicable to the way that NASA operates in the twenty-first century.
In addition to all of these factors, it is also worth noting that NASA and other entities had produced much lower cost estimates for less ambitious lunar and Mars exploration plans. For instance, NASA’s 1992 First Lunar Outpost proposal had a projected cost of $25 billion (see “The last lunar outpost”, March 15, 2004) and some other estimates of human Mars missions were in the $40 billion range. There was no reason for reporters to pick the big totals from 1989 rather than the much smaller figures other than the fact that it was easier for them to find the big numbers.
Recer’s unnamed sources had completely misinterpreted the history—the $400-$550 billion cost estimates produced in 1989 were not produced by Congress, and were for three decades or more of both lunar and Mars exploration, not a single Mars expedition. They had also completely exaggerated the effects of inflation. When informed of this, Recer paused for several seconds and finally answered, “oh well.”
The echo chamber
The January 8 Recer article in the Associated Press proved to have a major impact on later press reporting. Recer’s story was widely distributed, appearing in dozens of newspapers across the country, such as the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Over the next several weeks, numerous articles by other reporters quoted the $1 trillion figure, usually for a human mission to Mars. Some of them attributed the number to the Associated Press and some did not, but nearly all had clearly gotten the number from Recer’s article. Many of them stated that a single Mars expedition alone would cost $1 trillion, whereas others later stated that this was the overall cost estimate for the entire space exploration plan.
But something else often happened. One of the problems that alert reporters should have noticed with Recer’s original article was that he never named his source, so there was no way for other reporters to call that source and confirm the information themselves. This did not prove much of an impediment for reporters or editors, however. Because the $1 trillion cost estimate was repeated so often, even if they were uncomfortable taking the number from Recer’s piece, reporters could often quote somebody who had merely repeated the number they had read in the newspaper, therefore avoiding the problem of determining its validity. Furthermore, in at least one case it appears that sloppy editing allowed someone to invent a source for the number.
On January 9 another article by Associated Press writer Scott Lindlaw included the exact same paragraph as in the Recer article, although the rest of Lindlaw’s article was completely different. Lindlaw’s article appeared in many places, such as the website of the liberal British newspaper The Guardian. One unusual aspect of the Lindlaw article was that in addition to the paragraph that was borrowed from the earlier story by Recer, Lindlaw also mentioned “When the first President Bush proposed such a project, the estimated price tag was $400 billion to $500 billion.” Although this was accurate, it omitted the important caveat that the “project” was also only one approach to achieving the president’s goals. It also omitted the fact that there had been other, much lower cost estimates.
Lindlaw’s article also stated that former astronaut and senator John Glenn had commented on completing the International Space Station and setting exploration timetables. Glenn was never quoted directly in the article and Lindlaw did not quote Glenn concerning the cost of the exploration plan. The reference to Glenn occurred nine paragraphs after the mention of a $1 trillion cost estimate and two paragraphs after the reference to the $400-$500 billion estimate for the 1989 plan.
By January 15, a short Associated Press article without a byline appeared on numerous websites. It stated “The first American to orbit the globe, retired Senator John Glenn, said it could cost $1 trillion.” There was only one problem with this statement—Glenn apparently never said it. The AP article appears to have been a heavily condensed version of the Scott Lindlaw article of January 9 that never attributed the cost estimate to Glenn. In the course of editing it, someone claimed that Glenn had said something he had never said.
This new AP article was extremely short and appears to have been used primarily by radio and television stations rather than the print media. It is common for radio and television stations to repeat stories that they first see in newspapers or on the news wires, usually condensed to only a few sentences. This new, shorter AP story appeared on the websites of WJAC TV in central Pennsylvania, and WCAX TV in Burlington, Vermont. On January 15 the local Washington DC Fox News affiliate, WTTG, ran a story about the Bush proposal. News anchor Allison Seymour introduced the story by saying that the Bush plan “could cost trillions.” Not “a trillion,” but “trillions.” The broadcast news story, however, did not include the word “trillion.”
The association between John Glenn and the trillion-dollar figure also became part of the mythos. The Interfaith Alliance, a religious lobbying group, issued “an open letter to President George W. Bush” on January 15. Alliance president Reverend Dr. C. Welton Gaddy and the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Reverend Dr. Robert W. Edgar, wrote: “Former Senator John Glenn, the first American to orbit our planet, and others familiar with space science estimate that it will cost in excess of $1 trillion to implement your space plan.” Presumably the people “familiar with space science” were the Associated Press reporters who had gotten the numbers wrong in the first place.
Recer’s $1 trillion cost estimate was often included in other articles. On January 9 the Seattle Times printed an article by Gwyneth K. Shaw and Michael Cabbage that repeated the number. The end of the article included a note: “Information on mission costs was provided by The Associated Press.” The next day the Times ran another article, this one based upon news service reports, that also repeated the $1 trillion figure. The same day the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article by science writer Carl T. Hall that mentioned the $1 trillion figure. The figure was also mentioned in the Hartford Courant, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun. It also was repeated by foreign newspapers: by two different science reporters in the British newspaper The Telegraph, as well as the Jerusalem Post and the Glasgow Herald. An article appearing in the British newspaper The Guardian included the subheading “How George Bush could have used the money spent on the mission to Mars,” as if the $1 trillion had been spent in the preceding week.
Over the weekend the $1 trillion estimate took on more apparent legitimacy. On Sunday, January 11, “CNN Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” had on several guests, including U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Democratic presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman. Blitzer asked Evans about the cost figure. “Some estimating already this could cost a trillion dollars over 20 years,” Blitzer said, according to a CNN transcript of the program. Evans, who had no role in the space policy, did not deny the $1 trillion figure, but stated that “this program will be within a responsible fiscal budget.”
A few minutes later Blitzer asked the same question of Senator Lieberman, but did not repeat the trillion dollar figure in his question. In his reply Lieberman declared his support for the space program. “But if you asked me whether the best use of $1 trillion of American taxpayer money in the coming years is to land a mission on Mars or the Moon, I’d say no,” Lieberman added. “We need it right here on Earth to give health care that’s affordable to everybody, to improve our education system, and do better on veteran’s benefits and homeland security.”
On January 14 the Denver Post printed an article on the new plan that stated that congressman Mark Udall, Colorado Democrat, suspected the cost of the new plan would be “more along the lines of $1 trillion over 30 years.” There is no indication how Udall arrived at this figure, but he undoubtedly also got it from the AP story.
An article in the Sacramento Bee on January 14 quoted Tom Schatz, head of Citizens Against Government Waste. Schatz, according to the Bee, stated that “Cost estimates for the new program range from $550 billion to $1 trillion.” When contacted about this statement, CAGW’s media manager, Mark Carpenter, stated that Schatz’s statement was based upon several media sources, including an Associated Press article. Flawed math repeated
In addition to reporters and editors and television commentators and even politicians repeating the inaccurate number from the Associated Press article, some critics chose to invent their own numbers. Surprisingly, they often used the same flawed math as Recer did, bringing to mind the old joke that those who fail to learn from history are probably failing algebra as well.
On January 15, for instance, Arizona Daily Star reporter Thomas Stauffer quoted a University of Arizona professor emeritus of planetary sciences “who was involved in several pre-Apollo NASA missions.” The professor, Robert G. Strom, said “The price of doing those things now is probably close to a trillion dollars when this is all over.”
When contacted via e-mail and asked about the origin of his trillion dollar estimate, Strom said that he had told the reporter that the cost would actually be between $500 billion and a trillion, but that the reporter chose the latter number. Strom also cited the 1989 cost estimate, which he remembered was around $520 billion, and adjusted for inflation at an annual rate of 3% to reach a cost of around $725 billion today.
On January 9, a liberal lobbying group, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, also took a position on the issue. Its executive director, Robert Greenstein, posted a statement about the Bush space plan on the CBPP’s website. Before the Bush plan was unveiled, Greenstein was quoted by several news sources stating that the cost of the Bush space plan would be $500 billion to $1 trillion. On January 12 he was quoted by Susan Jones of the Cybercast News Service. On January 14, he was quoted by Randall Mikkelsen in a Reuters wire article.
When contacted about the source of this estimate, CBPP Communications Director Henry Griggs admitted that the CBPP had not done any formal estimates of the cost using accepted accounting procedures for aerospace projects. Griggs stated that Greenstein got his figures from a $500 billion quote for the original Space Exploration Initiative plan in 1989, and an article by Gregg Easterbrook in The Atlantic Monthly. “It was a combination of Bush 1 and Gregg Easterbrook,” Griggs said.
An extensive search of Easterbrook’s articles in The Atlantic failed to turn up any that provided cost estimates for a Moon/Mars exploration plan. It seems more likely that Greenstein actually got his estimate from a post Easterbrook made to his Internet “weblog” on January 12 and that his memory is confused about which Easterbrook article he was referencing.
Greenstein took the oft-misquoted $500 billion figure for the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative and “adjusted for inflation,” according to Griggs. But the cost inflator for 1989 is 1.6, meaning that a dollar in 1989 is worth $1.60 today. Using this inflation adjustment, the $500 billion figure would be $800 billion, not $1 trillion. “We never claimed to be experts on this,” Griggs stated in a phone interview when asked why their inflation adjustment was so inaccurate. Griggs also noted that Bush had not mentioned the space plan in his State of the Union Address a few days later, implying that the president had been scared away by all the criticism over the inflated cost of the plan.
Also on January 12, New Republic Editor Gregg Easterbrook reported on his website “Easterblogg” that the cost was likely to be $1 trillion. “Blogs” are relatively recent developments and do not meet even basic standards of journalism. Nevertheless, journalists often turn to them for information. Some journalists consider Easterbrook to be an expert on space policy, although many space experts have frequently found problems with Easterbrook’s commentaries on this subject.
Easterbrook makes no secret of his anti-spaceflight opinions and is often critical of NASA’s cost estimates. Easterbrook explained how he reached the $1 trillion figure on his own. Although he is critical of NASA cost estimates, he started with the 1989 estimate of $400 billion for the Space Exploration Initiative. However, Easterbrook erroneously assumed that this $400 billion was for a Mars mission alone, not for both the Moon and Mars missions. He then adjusted it for inflation, making it $600 billion. “Add in a Moon base and the price zooms toward $1 trillion!” he exclaimed. But only five paragraphs earlier Easterbrook had stated that a Moon base would cost $200 billion, which he determined by taking what he claimed to be the cost of the International Space Station—$100 billion—and doubling it to $200 billion. By explaining his math, Easterbrook also explained his mistakes. In effect, he counted the Moon base twice without realizing it. But even when accounting for this mistake, it is difficult to understand how $600 billion plus $200 billion equals $1 trillion. Few reputable economists regularly round off by $200 billion increments.
Easterbrook revised his argument slightly for the February 2 issue of The New Republic, but still repeated the faulty math of counting the lunar base cost twice in his calculations. Unlike many of the other articles, Easterbrook at least made it easy to debunk his mathematics. In addition to his explicit mistakes, he also demonstrated a bias that was probably at work for many other writers—the tendency to assume that any number they were given was low and therefore inflate it even further, often rounding up to the next significant figure. They often distrusted the validity of the numbers, but never chose to actually examine the numbers, instead choosing the simpler route of adding zeroes to them.
On January 14 President Bush announced his space plan at NASA Headquarters and indicated that he was advocating spending a total of $12 billion over five years on the plan, only $1 billion of it additional money. Many newspaper articles reported that this was not a lot of money, and in fact would come primarily from within NASA’s existing budget. But despite this new information, some reporters refused to abandon the $1 trillion number, while at the same time failing to check its origins. Others erroneously reported that the primary emphasis of the new program was placing a human on Mars. For instance, a January 26 Time magazine cover contained the headline “Mission to Mars.” This was the same issue that carried Easterbrook’s essay on the costs.
Some large newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post never mentioned the $1 trillion figure. They did, however, mention that the Bush plan would undoubtedly cost more than was in the proposed budget figures.
The combination of the widely-reported $1 trillion figure and the newly-released NASA figures created an ironic situation: some reporters and commentators assumed that NASA and White House officials must be lying (or worse) because the numbers were so completely different. Some reporters later wrote about the story as if the Bush figures had no validity at all, because other estimates had been much higher—$1 trillion.
At the time of the Bush speech NASA released a confusing budget chart that indicated how much money the agency would spend on various projects over the next 20 years. If one carefully separated out the exploration part of the chart from the rest, it was possible to determine that NASA planned to spend approximately $170 billion on various aspects of space exploration over this period, including robotic probes to Mars and Jupiter. Lunar exploration would be only one part of this figure and human Mars exploration was not part of it at all. But in the press coverage that followed the announcement, just about the only part of this that reporters acknowledged was a 20-year timeframe. On January 19 Paul Recer wrote another article about the space plan. Despite the fact that in the intervening 11 days the new Bush plan had been released and did not contain anywhere near $1 trillion in new spending, Recer repeated in its entirety his original paragraph on the costs of the mission. More whispers
Not everyone in the media automatically repeated the trillion dollar figure, but most of the cost estimates were extremely high. The Delmarva Daily Times, a small regional newspaper in Maryland, stated that the Bush plan “has been estimated to cost up to $500 billion.” The Denver Post ran an editorial stating that a Mars mission “may cost a half-trillion dollars.” A left-wing website, AlterNet.org, stated that the plan would cost “hundreds of billions.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a generally supportive column that stated that “the cost of going to Mars has been estimated at somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion.” On January 18 the New York Times cited John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, as claiming that the cost of establishing a base on the Moon by 2020 could be $150 billion. The article also inaccurately reported that the 1989 cost estimate for a mission to Mars was “around $400 billion.”
Few reporters were skeptical of the high cost estimates that were being endlessly repeated by their colleagues. Florida Today writers John Kelly and Todd Halvorson, both knowledgeable space journalists, wrote on January 14 that “Critics pounced on the price tag given the nation’s other needs, some citing erroneous estimates that ranged as high at $1 trillion.” But there do not appear to be any other examples of reporters directly questioning the high numbers.
On January 20, the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article on the Bush plan by John Iwasaki that in many ways represented the high water mark for sloppy reporting on the space plan. Iwasaki stated: “Whether Congress and the American people will support an effort for manned flights to Mars is another question, given the costs—$12 billion over five years and perhaps a trillion dollars over 20 years—and other pressing needs.”
Iwasaki managed to incorporate at least four errors into a single sentence. First, he mistakenly assumed that the Bush plan called for a manned mission to Mars, rather than vaguely stating that this was to be an eventual goal at some indeterminate point in the future. Second, he incorrectly stated that the new plan was to spend $12 billion over five years solely on Mars. But the next part of that sentence was no better. The 20-year timeframe included approximately $170 billion on all aspects of exploration. The $1 trillion figure was poorly based upon the original 30-year timeframe of the 1989 Space Exploration Initiative. Iwasaki combined the new timeframe and the old grossly-inflated cost estimate, meaning that 30 years of expenditures would have to be crammed into a 20-year budget. But this would require the administration to spend the remaining $988 billion in fifteen years, an average of $66 billion per year, or nearly four and a half times the current NASA budget. “Preposterous”
One unanswered question is why NASA did not choose to limit the damage and counter the widely-repeated $1 trillion cost estimate immediately. One of the rules of Washington politics is to get ahead of the story and control it, not be constantly responding to spurious charges, or worse, allowing them to propagate on their own. However, NASA apparently chose a different approach to dealing with negative press, and the agency soon found itself receiving more negative publicity about the decision to cancel the Hubble servicing mission.
On January 21 NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe spoke to reporters about the new space plan. O’Keefe said that NASA did not know how much the new space plan would cost. “Though he declined to offer a cost estimate,” wrote Knight-Ridder science correspondent Seth Borenstein, “he said figures of $500 billion or $1 trillion were ‘preposterous.’” O’Keefe’s statement was not widely reported. It also appeared to have no effect. On January 31 an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Mike Toner repeated the $1 trillion cost estimate. In mid-February an article in the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Nonpareil also repeated the $1 trillion figure. The continued life of this mythical figure suggests that it has now become the new media benchmark for a Mars mission, just like the $400 billion figure in 1989. Ten years from now, when some reporter is writing about the costs of sending humans to Mars, it seems likely that they will do a quick media search and find the $1 trillion cost estimate and repeat it without question, undoubtedly inflating it even more.
After nearly two weeks of wildly inflated figures circulating in the media, the damage had already been done. For instance, on January 20 the Washington Post reported the results of a poll that indicated dissatisfaction with Bush’s handling of domestic issues. “And his call to establish a manned base on the Moon and eventually send American astronauts to Mars is broadly unpopular,” the article stated. Perhaps one of the reasons for its unpopularity was that for two weeks the media had been claiming that the plan would cost $1 trillion and nobody had bothered to claim otherwise.
Of course this is the way that the media world works for many things in politics: reporters on deadline do not bother to check facts; complex subjects are summarized in such a way that information is not only lost but distorted; bad editing introduces major errors; political lobbying groups are willing to wildly exaggerate the costs of programs they oppose; hyperbole is repeated as fact by reporters; and pundits are also perfectly willing to invent numbers that suit their purposes. A gold-plated and unrealistic cost estimate from 1989 was accepted at face value nearly 15 years later, adjusted for inflation, then rounded up by nearly 60% by a reporter. Others then inflated it even more. And for weeks nobody in the media bothered to question it.
Another unfortunate lesson here is that although NASA has little credibility when it comes to cost estimates, neither does the press. There is certainly tremendous irony in the fact that reporters who are so skeptical of NASA cost estimates are themselves prone to wild exaggeration and inability to apply simple inflation adjustments. Gregg Easterbrook may ridicule NASA cost estimates, but unlike him, the space agency has never misstated the cost of a program by hundreds of billions of dollars.
What makes this entire whispering game so bizarre is not that it happened, but that it was totally predictable. After all, it happened in 1989. Yet neither NASA nor the White House did anything at all to stop it from happening again. In 1989 George H.W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative was dead on arrival largely because of NASA’s unrealistic $400 billion price tag. The ghost of that giant elephant in the corner had never been exorcised and it came back to haunt the second Bush administration in 2004.
Humor writer Dave Barry, however, may have summarized the situation the best. “The Bush administration says the Mars mission can be accomplished for only 143.8 zillion dollars,” Barry wrote. “But critics claim that the true cost is likely to be much more like 687 fillion dillion dollars. (These numbers are imaginary, but trust me, they’re as accurate as any other cost estimates you see about the Mars mission.)”
I wonder if Paul Harvey will use this as a "and now for the rest of the story" bit?
I have published here my own back-of-envelope calculated costs--based on only 29 years of experience in the aerospace industry. My conclusions were perfectly in synch with the values the author tries to discredit.
His arguments are bootless, and stem from a profound and invincible ignorance.
--Boris
Yeah, it's all my fault. My calculator got scrambled.
All I did was devote my life to getting humans into the Solar System. After 29 years I am completely disillusioned and burned out. My fault. What have you been doing meanwhile?
I invite you to survey the numerous threads where I have posted estimates and my rationale and refute them one by one.
--Boris
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