Ask HN: What could NASA do with a 100B budget? - cvaidya1986
======
amarant
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.

------
db48x
It's been estimated that a space elevator would only cost $50B.

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

~~~
db48x
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.

~~~
dekhn
yes. The TL;DR is you don't spend $150B on a project you can't achieve with
the hope that some of the side-products are useful. You spend $150B on a
portfolio of projects that are likely to succeed, and monitor the physical
properties of recent inventions, _then_ if you have a plausible engineering
plan _and_ a good business model, you _may_ proceed to blow $150B.

------
jareds
Still need more money for the James Webb space telescope.

------
eip
Use better CGI in their videos?

------
k0t0n0
spy more !

