179 Trips To The Moon
179 Round Trips to the Moon & 7 Other Things You Could Do in the Time Since Senate Democrats Last Passed a Budget, Speaker of the House John Boehner
“If you follow the same plan as the crew of Apollo 11, you could fly to the moon and back 179 times.”
Keith’s note: (really) quick and rough budget snapshot: Apollo was estimated to cost roughly $170 billion in 2005 dollars – divide that total cost by 25 or so Apollo/Skylab missions and you get a rough average of $6.8 billion/flight. So doing Apollo 179 times (in 4 years!) would costaround $1trillion … oh and you’d need a dozen copies of KSC to do it in that time frame – but that is still not enough to buy a Death Star however.
White House Deletes Death Star Funds from NASA’s FY2014 Budget, earlier post.
I find your lack of faith disturbing…
“Climb Mt. Everest 292 Times”
Oh I guess the graphic only refers to time elapsed… because that would make the trips to the Moon seem like a massive bargain if it was money.
That is the way I interpreted it.
Actually, if you made that many trips, I suspect the marginal cost of additional trips would drop considerably. You are also putting the same developmental cost per mission penality for 25 missions on each additional mission. The corresct thing to do would be tospread it out over 179+25 missions. I suspect at that number, considering you would be mass-producing and not hand building the hardware at that flight rate, you could get the total cost down to under a billion dollar per mission.
179 missions over 4 years would mean 44.75 launches per year or 3.7 launches per month – non-stop. Odds are you’d need another VAB or or more to handle vehicle integration and multiple launch pads. Someone would have to recreate Rockwell Downey (they tore everything down last year) to make more Apollos and a couple of new O&C buildings to handle the assembly line of CSMs and LEMs, more barges too to ferry the Saturn V stages. I am guessing that no Moon base is implied so you’d have at least one or more missions en route to and from the Moon on a constant basis so mission control in Houston would need some expansion and you’d need to have a dedicated naval presence in place for recovery operations and ships to relive them. And you’d have to build hundreds of High Schools since every crew member would need at least one named after them. Since there’d be more moon rocks in circulation, there’d be more elderly ladies with moon rocks that the NASA OIG would have to investigate – so they’d need more staff as well. Its not as simple as the Speaker suggests….
As long as they bring back Life magazine, too, I’d be happy.
Would boost GDP by ~2%, and put 5+ Million people to work, great idea!