[ARCADIA]

And where is this money supposed to come from?

The short answer is, that it would probably come by increasing the national debt.

The more relevant question is what will these dollars yield for us? The return on the original Apollo/Shuttle program turned out to be far greater then its enormous cost. Countless consumer products, indutrial technologies, intellectual techniques, and even a whole new genre of entertainment were generated by our efforts. If we can get the same kind of multiplier effect going then the return on every dollar can be very good.

We can only do that by doing this on the right scale. $500M will barely pay for a car wash, and what we need is to conduct R&D leading to the manufacture of a better, safer, and more efficient car. If AOL/Time Warner can blow 200x that amount in a year, a keystone national endevor would certainly be worth many times $500M.

[ARCADIA]

It sounds like we, like the natives on King Kong's island, have lost so much of our technology that we can barely maintain the wall that keeps our enemies at bay. Do we dare to admit that we no longer have the technology and means to replace a lost space shuttle?