On Feb 3, 6:22 pm, John Schilling <schil...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> NASA couldn't do it, not even with unlimited funding and the
> certain knowledge that every NASA employee would be tortured to death
> if they failed.
I doubt the torture would matter. With unlimited funding anything is
possible.
NASA currently represents <1% of the budget of the US government and
that covers various other projects.
If they were allocated 5% of the total budget and told to concentrate
on this one mission, that would represent almost $300 billion a year.
In fact, a $60 billion prize for the first 5 companies to make it to
the test point, as long as they reach the point by 2018, would
probably do it and if they let the fund build up over a few years,
they could have prizes in the $300 billion range per winner.
However, it seems to me that there isn't much benefit to an FTL drive
at the moment. Especially if it is based on a jump point out near
Saturn. We need a cheap way to get into orbit before any of that
matters.
Presumably, the mission is to send the probe and have it jump out,
take someone astro measurements and then jump back ? This would yield
some scientific data, but wouldn't be very useful in and of itself,
unless it leads to unrelated advances elsewhere (perhaps it helps us
zero in on an improved unified physics theory).
The only benefit would be to increase the value of space travel by
massively expanding the potienial resource horizon. This has the
potential to increase funding for space research (and could cause
conflicts over control of the jump point).
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