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Ask HN: What could NASA do with a 100B budget?
- jareds 8y agoStill need more money for the James Webb space telescope.
- eip 8y agoUse better CGI in their videos?
- db48x 8y agoIt's been estimated that a space elevator would only cost $50B.
- dekhn 8y ago... using tech that doesn't exist yet, which means the actual cost is infinite.
- db48x 8y agoPossibly :) It's been a few years since I read about it, but I think that was the estimate for both developing the tech and deploying it. Of course there's the chance that they spend all $50 billion and still fail to find a way to make carbon nanotubes work at macroscopic scale, but I bet they'd have learned quite a lot of other interesting things doing that research. And they did have a lot of trouble deploying tethers from the space shuttle that one time.
- dekhn 8y agoyes. The TL;DR is you don't spend $150B on a project you can't achieve with the hope that some of the side-products are useful. You spend $150B on a portfolio of projects that are likely to succeed, and monitor the physical properties of recent inventions, then if you have a plausible engineering plan and a good business model, you may proceed to blow $150B.
- k0t0n0 8y agospy more !
- amarant 8y agosurvey the moon for good locations to build a habitat, possibly inside some cavernous natural structure, or simply by digging on the surface. develop machinery to build said habitat and possibly launch it to the moon and build a habitat there complete with solar cells for energy and some sort of life support system. operation of the base probably does not fit into this budget. or at least not for long. lots of possibilities for unforeseen complications here, hard to know how far you'll actually get on a given budget. this might be entirely optimistic.