On Feb 5, 4:18=A0am, Erik Max Francis <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> John Schilling wrote:
>
>> A bunch of people who are now dead, or close enough as makes no
>> difference, did it before. =A0They can't do it again. =A0That a bunch
>> of completely different people are now doing business under the
>> same name, doesn't mean they can do what the dead guys once did.
Hmm. So stuff like Apollo only happened in about ten years, because of
a specific group of, what, several 10's of thousands of people, who
were unique in ways that we can't duplicate today? Somehow I'd have to
agree with Erik, that seems an unrealistic objection. And as I recall,
Apollo wasn't even motivated by anything financial - it was
essentially a political goal that was completed in a short period of
time because (at least in part) it harnessed the economic machine of
the time (there was a lot of money to be made by getting the contract,
if you could do it *fast*).
>> You might as well ask Xerox to develop the information
>> technologies that will dominate the coming decades... [etc.]
Or, you might as well use that money to create an economic leverage -
the X prize being a very poor, underfunded example compared to Apollo,
for instance. Remember, this is rasfs. To work here, I just need to
have a reasonable suspension of disbelief. And given that Apollo was
done, technically, in less time, is a very good start on that
disbelief.
As far as the "launch window" constraint goes, well, again, putting
together a fortuitous arrangement of planets isn't a big hurdle,
especially as a Voyager-like launch window to Saturn opens about once
every decade, not once a century. And Voyager was done using a Titan
IIIE Centaur combination - was does a Titan heavy w/ Centaur get you
now? Clearly a probe to Jupiter in a decade or two is possible, and
I'd guess to Jupiter in under a decade. Tight, but not as far out as
you would seem to put it.
--
Brian Davis
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