Rob Wilson / 11:44 pm February 5th, 2006

I can’t even bring myself to write the words to describe the horror that is the space shuttle budgetary black hole. I’ll just let Clark say it:

* Florida Today points out that “In the past three years, Congress has given the [Shuttle] program $13 billion, and all that money has resulted in just two flights”. Sword of Damocles: NASA must safely launch the space shuttles this year, or the program won’t survive - Florida Today - Feb.5.06.

To put that into perspective:
* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn’t said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.
* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.
* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.
* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.