Ask HN: What could NASA do with a 100B budget?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17701375

by cvaidya1986 • 8 years ago

2 8 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

jareds• 8 years ago

Still need more money for the James Webb space telescope.

eip• 8 years ago

Use better CGI in their videos?

db48x2• 8 years ago

It's been estimated that a space elevator would only cost $50B.

dekhn2• 8 years ago

... using tech that doesn't exist yet, which means the actual cost is infinite.

db48x2• 8 years ago

Possibly :)

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.

k0t0n0• 8 years ago

spy more !

amarant• 8 years ago

survey 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.

Ask HN: What could NASA do with a 100B budget?

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