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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: I want that Billion
Message-ID: <C63vvG.4J9@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 19:38:01 GMT
References: <1rh4rqINNi7o@mojo.eng.umd.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 35

In article <1rh4rqINNi7o@mojo.eng.umd.edu> sysmgr@king.eng.umd.edu writes:
>>>You'd need to launch HLVs to send up large amounts of stuff.  Do you know 
>>>of a private Titan pad? 
>>Nobody who is interested in launching things cheaply will buy Titans.  It
>>doesn't take many Titan pricetags to pay for a laser launcher or a large
>>gas gun or a development program for a Big Dumb Booster, all of which
>>would have far better cost-effectiveness.
>
>Henry, I made the assumption that he who gets there firstest with the mostest
>wins. 

Only if he doesn't spend more than a billion dollars doing it, since the
prize is not going to be scaled up to match the level of effort.  You can
spend a billion pretty quickly buying Titan launches.

What's more, if you buy Titans, the prize money is your entire return on
investment.  If you develop a new launch system, it has other uses, and
the prize is just the icing on the cake.

I doubt very much that a billion-dollar prize is going to show enough
return to justify the investment if you are constrained to use current
US launchers.  (There would surely be a buy-American clause in the rules
for such a prize, since it would pretty well have to be government-funded.)
You're going to *have* to invest your front money in building a new launch
system rather than pissing it away on existing ones.  Being there first is
of no importance if you go bankrupt doing it.

>... could I get a couple of CanadARMs tuned for the lunar environment?  I
>wanna do some teleoperated prospecting while I'm up there...

I'm sure Spar would offer to develop such a lunar-tuned system and deliver
a couple of them to you for only a couple of hundred million dollars.
-- 
SVR4 resembles a high-speed collision   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
between SVR3 and SunOS.    - Dick Dunn  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
