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Maybe several hundred billion for a private company to make it and a trillion for it to be worth the risk.

Uh, no. Anything NASA can do, the private sector could do much cheaper. I forget the number for the entire Apollo program in today's dollars, but it is nowhere near that much. And now we know how to do it, then we didn't.

hopespringseternal wrote: "Uh, no. Anything NASA can do, the private sector could do much cheaper. I forget the number for the entire Apollo program in today's dollars, but it is nowhere near that much. And now we know how to do it, then we didn't."

Of course, government is an inefficient thing at best, but the point is that government exists to do the things that everyone else needs but can't provide on their own. Everybody needs an army to protect them, but we can't all afford tanks and helicopters alone, thats why we get together and create a government for the common defense. The same will apply to spacecraft until some breakthroughs come along.

Also, Apollo was like a scouting mission, whereas this is a fullscale outpost. You need a lot more stuff than you can fit into a LEM.

Also, all the information about Apollo is lost. We literally don't know how to do it anymore. The MER entry descent and landing team had to go back and ask the people who designed the heat shields for the capsules, because they discovered that they had no information on how to make a heat shield. NASA didn't document it, and the only way to get the info is to go back and ask the people who did it. These people are retired now, which is all the more reason for us to do this while we still have the first generation of NASAns' living memory. After that, we'll have no experiential advantage over anybody else in this new race.

34 - "I forget the number for the entire Apollo program in today's dollars, but it is nowhere near that much."

The total cost of the Apollo program was $24 billion. (I don't know in what $, but that was about 1975-80).

You must remember that was before the contractors and NASA learned how to make the space program into a cash cow and charge exhorbitant prices for everything. I do, however, remember that the crawler cost $7.5 million - for two of them.