NASA: We're sending humans to Mars

Re:NASA: We're sending humans to Mars by peteretep on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @11:18PM (#8691888)

    > yet they forget that a company can only survive for so
    > long without positive returns and that limits their risk
    > tolerance tremendously

A company can make a loss indefinitely, as long as they don't run out of money. While Elon Musk carries such a high personal net worth, and the dream of hitting Mars stays front and foremost, that means they can make a loss for a very long time...

For some reason, this all brings to mind the Keynes quote: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".

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Re:NASA: We're sending humans to Mars by Daishiman on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @02:52AM (#8692435)

Elon Musk and his friends' personal fortunes are a drop in the bucket compared to an established federal agency's funding. NASA's requested funding for 2014 is $17 billion.

If you count their accumulated physical assets, manpower and "intellectual property" (assuming aerospace knowledge such as that could be valued effectively), you'd find that very few institutions outside of some multinational corporations and government agencies are that big.

I doubt Musk would be able to get such funding every year until 2030, or whatever arbitrary target is set to get a man to Mars.

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