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A comment on Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by geuis on Thursday September 25, 2008 @02:42PM (#315204)
Wow I was thinking the exact same thing. Put the money into an Apollo-scale project to perfect the 1st gen space elevator. Most of the money would go to research. The price of building it once you have the know-how is a trivially small amount of the total $700 billion.
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Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by ivankirigin on Thursday September 25, 2008 @02:45PM (#315208)
You mentioned Apollo, others mentioned the space shuttle.

NASA is a horrible organization to actually get things done. I wouldn't emulate them. Burt Rutan is a hero.

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by njharman on Thursday September 25, 2008 @09:48PM (#315673)
Yeah, cause every other space agency actually got off their asses and put men on the moon, deployed and operated a space lab, deployed and operated a largely reuseable launch vehicle that hardly ever blows up, drove rc cars around mars for months, etc.
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Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by ivankirigin on Thursday September 25, 2008 @11:17PM (#315721)
Going to the moon was a horrible idea. It was a very poor use of resources. That's why we haven't been back in 40 years.

The Mars rovers are the exception the proves the rule. Operational for years after a few hundred million dollars spent, while each shuttle mission eats over $1B.

Any reasonable manager would have scrapped the shuttle long ago.

The reason NASA does more is that we have more money than others, not because they are better.

The goal after all is long term benefit to the human race (or profit). Nasa hasn't done all that much towards that end. If anything, they were a good excuse to design ICBMs.

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Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by william42 on Thursday September 25, 2008 @08:32PM (#315626)
A hero that has not even reached orbit yet.
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Re:Ask HN: What would you do with $700 Billion? by ivankirigin on Thursday September 25, 2008 @11:17PM (#315723)
Given the $1B spent on each shuttle launch, I'm sure he could make it.
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