Bush's space plan

On Jan 13, 2004, at 11:00 AM, ANTIcarrot wrote:

> I can't help but wonder how difficult it would be to put another Mir
> up there. Surely it would be reasonably profitable.
> Mir cost: $80M
>

Where's you get this number?

Don't forget operations costs. The shuttle was actually developed with
only a 15% overrun, but accomplished this by pushing costs out to
operations with disasterous results.
The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.