"Soon we will land on the moon". Outline of China's Aerospace Development Program.

CPP20011204000017 Beijing Jiefangjun Bao ^ | 03 Dec 2001 | Article by Zuo Saichun

[patriot_wes]

"Soon we will land on the moon".

...they'll sure be surprised when they go to start the ole lunar rover!

[RightWhale]

the programs you advocate would cost trillions of dollars.

The one I know most about is asteroid mining, which will pay for itself and be highly profitable to boot. Another one that I haven't analyzed from an economic perspective is lunar He3. Yet another is orbiting power stations, which wouldn't be competitive with natural gas and oil at this time, but would be an adjunct to asteroid mining.

Point is, some space development is simple spending programs in hopes of getting some science back. Other space development can be highly profitable business. We need to examine space development in more detail, it's not all the same.

[captain11]

It performed just like most French technology.

Yeah...whatever.

[boris]

"What a pipe dream! It took the US -- which INVENTED aviation -- a Manhattan Project-sized effort to do it and, in 2002 dollars, approximately half a trillion dollars. The Chinese will not be landing on the Moon anytime in the the lifetime of any adult alive today."

The cost of the Apollo project, in "then-year" dollars, was approximately $27 billion. For reference, Eisenhower's national highway system cost $100 billion.

Assuming a six-percent rate of inflation since 1969, The cost today would be about $184 billion. At 3% inflation, it would be $71 billon. This does not consider the immense advances in technology which would permit it to be done more cheaply. On the other hand it does not consider that most of the infrastructure (supplier base, etc.) have vanished because they were starved to death by the end of Apollo. So I'm calling it a push.

Anyhow, "half a trillion dollars" is an idiotic statement.

--Boris

[general_re]

Assuming a six-percent rate of inflation since 1969, The cost today would be about $184 billion. At 3% inflation, it would be $71 billon.

If you follow the CPI (and what else have we got to work with, really?), $27 billion in 1969 translates to about $132 billion today. By way of contrast, the Manhattan Project cost a little shy of $1.9 billion, through the end of 1945, in 1945 dollars, or about $18.8 billion in 2002 dollars....