re i want that billion in article c vvg j zoo toronto edu henry zoo toronto edu henry spencer writes 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 fine i ll buy from george georgeee that assumes i can t weasel out a cooperative venture of some sort cut me a break on the launcher i ll cut you in on the proceeds if it works only the government pays higher than list price 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 unless you re martin marietta since as i recall they bought out the gd line of aerospace products if mm gd does it as an in house project their costs would look much better than buying at list price does anyone really know the profit margins built in to the titan c mon allen is telling us how cheap we can get improved this or that 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 oh please how much of a profit do you want pulling million after all is said and done wouldn t be too shabby not to mention the other goodies i ll collect in a movie tv rights say million conservatively b advertising look mommie they re drinking coke c intangibles name recognization experience data acculumated 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 if you want lean fine a million prize would be more than adequate for a prize maybe wales would be kind enough to define what a company would consider a decent profit if you want r d done you ll have to write in r d clauses i suppose you could make it a sbir set aside software engineering that s like military intelligence isn t it sysmgr cadlab eng umd edu
