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How is that for a startup idea? I'd probably pay a few hundred bucks to get some time programming a robot for a mission on the Moon. What's the cost for launch
by kiba 14y ago
How is that for a startup idea? I'd probably pay a few hundred bucks to get some time programming a robot for a mission on the Moon.
What's the cost for launch? What's the R&D cost? What's the specs?
Incidently, we already have people developing rovers and lander for the moon, thanks to the Google Lunar X Prize. Maybe by the end of the decade, we will be able to do what you want.
- robomartin 14y agoNo clue. Not my domain. I'll claim ignorance. I know it's not cheap. That said, if someone is willing to spend gobs and gobs of money to send a middle-aged couple for a Mars fly-by this would surely be orders of magnitude cheaper and far more likely to generate far more revenue.
- kiba 14y agoNo clue. Not my domain. I'll claim ignorance. Which doesn't exclude you from making a back-of-an-envelope calculation of the cost and a little bit of research, such as figuring out how expensive is a falcon heavy launch, and so on.
- robomartin 14y agoTrue. I could. In this case, I don't think one needs to go that far. I know, with near absolute certainty, that it would be far cheaper to land 1,000 little robots on the Moon than to send two people to do a Mars fly-by. There is no way a fully automatic (no humans, no life support) Moon mission could even approach the cost of a mission to Mars with everything you need to support life and bring them back to Earth. Part of engineering is to develop a sense for these things. After a while you don't need to resort to constantly calculating things to have an idea of the relative degree of complexity or cost of a project. This, I think, is one of those cases.