Race to Moon by Private Companies • Hacker News Board

Post by steauengeglase » Fri, Jul 22, 2011, 2:41 PM UTC

luckyeights wrote: post #15

colincsl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with CMU's effort and am pretty sure they are still planning on using SpaceX's Falcon 9 to launch the robot. The entrepreneurial ideas are necessary because going to the moon is very, very expensive. Even with the $30M prize, significant additional funds are necessary to get us there.

That's true, they're still planning to use the Falcon 9. I'm all for Google's prize and I think CMU is doing a great job. What bothers me is that significant incentives exist; SpaceX bids for plenty of contracts to deliver payloads to orbit or the space station. ( http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php ) Yes, there's plenty of room to expand into space tourism, space reality TV shows, and make money from that. But…

The NYT is good at a lot of things, but I'm not sure if I'd put space reporting on that list. This is the same fine institution that assumed that Robert Goddard didn't understand the first thing about basic physics.

Most of those ideas are hair brained, serve only to waste dollars and I think that is the editorial board's point. So I'll just smile as history repeats itself.