re i want that billion in article rh rqinni o mojo eng umd edu sysmgr king eng umd edu writes you d need to launch hlvs to send up large amounts of stuff do you know of a private titan pad nobody who is interested in launching things cheaply will buy titans it doesn t take many titan pricetags to pay for a laser launcher or a large gas gun or a development program for a big dumb booster all of which would have far better cost effectiveness henry i made the assumption that he who gets there firstest with the mostest wins only if he doesn t spend more than a billion dollars doing it since the prize is not going to be scaled up to match the level of effort you can spend a billion pretty quickly buying titan launches what s more if you buy titans the prize money is your entire return on investment if you develop a new launch system it has other uses and the prize is just the icing on the cake i doubt very much that a billion dollar prize is going to show enough return to justify the investment if you are constrained to use current us launchers there would surely be a buy american clause in the rules for such a prize since it would pretty well have to be government funded you re going to have to invest your front money in building a new launch system rather than pissing it away on existing ones being there first is of no importance if you go bankrupt doing it could i get a couple of canadarms tuned for the lunar environment i wanna do some teleoperated prospecting while i m up there i m sure spar would offer to develop such a lunar tuned system and deliver a couple of them to you for only a couple of hundred million dollars svr resembles a high speed collision henry spencer u of toronto zoology between svr and sunos dick dunn henry zoo toronto edu utzoo henry
