Moon base?
Newt Gingrich said in last Thursday's debate that if he became President, we'd have a base on the moon by the end of his second term. My immediate reaction was the same as Romney's: too expensive. But while Gingrich has some pretty wacky ideas, he's also a pretty smart guy, so I figured I ought to do the math.
The first sanity check was on the theoretical lower limit on the cost to send people to the moon. Barring a space elevator, that's going to involve rockets, which involves fuel. The Saturn V weighed 6,000,000 pounds, over 90% of which was fuel. Kerosene costs about $0.50 per pound, liquid hydrogen is more, and liquid oxygen less, so that might be a reasonable ballpark number for fuel. That tells us the theoretical lower limit is around $3,000,000 for three people, or $1,000,000 per person. That's expensive for the average person but it's not all that expensive in the greater scheme of things - there are commercial automobiles that cost more.
Of course, right now, the hardware costs a lot more than the fuel, and probably will continue to do so through the next decade, so that lower limit isn't reality. It does, however, justify a more detailed analysis.
Gingrich suggested devoting 10% of the NASA budget to prizes modeled on the Ansari X-prize for the first nongovernmental suborbital manned space flight. That prize resulted in a number of contenders, with a winner who is now working on a larger version for space tourism applications, for which several years' tickets have already been sold. The basic model seems reasonable, but do the numbers work out? Here are the numbers:
- The NASA budget for 2011 is $19 billion - around half a percent of the federal budget - so 10% of that is $1.9 billion.
- Virgin's Space Adventures sends space tourists into orbit, to the International Space Station, for $30 million each.
- Getting someone to the moon is roughly three times as expensive as getting them into orbit, both in terms of amount of fuel, and based on NASA's costs back in the 1960s.
That puts the per person cost of getting to the moon at around $90 million - and it also means that 10% of NASA's budget should be enough to send over 20 people to the moon each year, even without leverage from prizes or reductions in cost.
I draw two conclusions:
1. My gut reaction, and that of Mitt Romney, was wrong; Gingrich's moon base proposal isn't actually that expensive.
2. NASA is completely mismanaging the manned space program, given we haven't already done this. Perhaps this is why Gingrich wants to funnel the money to private players - they'll actually keep the costs down.
The first sanity check was on the theoretical lower limit on the cost to send people to the moon. Barring a space elevator, that's going to involve rockets, which involves fuel. The Saturn V weighed 6,000,000 pounds, over 90% of which was fuel. Kerosene costs about $0.50 per pound, liquid hydrogen is more, and liquid oxygen less, so that might be a reasonable ballpark number for fuel. That tells us the theoretical lower limit is around $3,000,000 for three people, or $1,000,000 per person. That's expensive for the average person but it's not all that expensive in the greater scheme of things - there are commercial automobiles that cost more.
Of course, right now, the hardware costs a lot more than the fuel, and probably will continue to do so through the next decade, so that lower limit isn't reality. It does, however, justify a more detailed analysis.
Gingrich suggested devoting 10% of the NASA budget to prizes modeled on the Ansari X-prize for the first nongovernmental suborbital manned space flight. That prize resulted in a number of contenders, with a winner who is now working on a larger version for space tourism applications, for which several years' tickets have already been sold. The basic model seems reasonable, but do the numbers work out? Here are the numbers:
- The NASA budget for 2011 is $19 billion - around half a percent of the federal budget - so 10% of that is $1.9 billion.
- Virgin's Space Adventures sends space tourists into orbit, to the International Space Station, for $30 million each.
- Getting someone to the moon is roughly three times as expensive as getting them into orbit, both in terms of amount of fuel, and based on NASA's costs back in the 1960s.
That puts the per person cost of getting to the moon at around $90 million - and it also means that 10% of NASA's budget should be enough to send over 20 people to the moon each year, even without leverage from prizes or reductions in cost.
I draw two conclusions:
1. My gut reaction, and that of Mitt Romney, was wrong; Gingrich's moon base proposal isn't actually that expensive.
2. NASA is completely mismanaging the manned space program, given we haven't already done this. Perhaps this is why Gingrich wants to funnel the money to private players - they'll actually keep the costs down.