How Much is That in Apollos?
FYI,
Even Sen. Dirkson would be astonished.
"How Much is That in Apollos?"
MSNBC
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/10/03/1489144.aspx
In current dollars, the Apollo program cost around $100 Billion.
How much will $700 billion get you? Roughly speaking, the widely publicized cost
of the financial bailout … er, rescue package … is equal to seven Apollo
programs, or 70 state-of-the-art atom-smashers. The magnitude of the figures
being thrown around is so much easier to understand when you use our currency
conversion chart for mega-projects.
A goodly number of real-world cost comparisons have come out since the $700
billion figure was first put out there, a couple of weeks ago. For example,
msnbc.com's First Read blog pointed out last week that $700 billion is just a
bit more than the gross domestic product of Taiwan, or the total expense on the
war on Iraq to date. If you take another tack, you could see it as three times
the annual income of every household in Ohio.
Of course, no comparison is going to be completely accurate. On one hand, the
initial price tag will almost certainly come to more than $700 billion, thanks
to $110 billion in goodies that were added to the plan to sweeten the deal. On
the other hand, the federal government could juggle the mortgage-related
securities so adroitly that some of the money is made back. Such spin-offs could
produce benefits to offset the bailout's effective cost.
Come to think of it, that's sort of how the space program works, too.
What we need is a currency scale that helps people visualize these
multimillion/multibillion-dollar government programs, using gee-whiz images if
possible. This would be handy for much more than the bailout: For example, when
someone talks about an Apollo-scale program for energy independence, what does
that actually mean?
Fortunately, folks who have been covering the space effort have been doing this
ever since the days of the actual Apollo program. "One Apollo" turns out to be a
relatively standard currency unit, the equivalent of $25 billion in 1970
dollars, or roughly $100 billion in today's dollars.
In fact, you could put together a whole scale of scientifically based currency
units, based on the estimated cost of big projects, including the Large Hadron
Collider and the international space station. In reality, these numbers are
always squishy. Nevertheless, even order-of-magnitude estimates can be helpful.
Let's start with the smallest unit for big projects. Back in 2004, reporters
covering SpaceShipOne's quest for the $10 million X Prize reflected on how much
money billionaire Paul Allen was contributing to the project. It turns out that
the reported figure - $25 million - crops up in another context. That's how much
Allen contributed to the initial construction phase of the Allen Telescope
Array, which is hunting for signals from alien civilizations.
In honor of those contributions, we can set the value of the allen at $25
million in 2004 dollars. Since then, the value has almost certainly gone up, to
the extent that you could probably use an allen to buy a $30 million trip to the
international space station. If you happen to have several allens sitting
around, you could start your own space program (as Elon Musk did when he
invested 4 allens to found SpaceX). And the scale just goes up from there, as
detailed in this currency chart:
: Currency unit... Equals ... In dollars ...
: 1 allen Paul Allen's expense on the $25 million
: SpaceShipOne project, or on (ranging up
: the Allen Telescope Array. to $30 million)
: Also, the cost of a ticket
: to the international space
: station on a Russian craft, or
: the Google Lunar X Prize purse.
: 1 rover 20 allens. Equal to the $500 million
: per-rover cost for NASA's (ranging down to
: Mars Exploration Rover mission. $400 million)
: 1 shuttle 2 rovers. Roughly equal $1 billion
: to the cost of launching (NASA has cited
: a shuttle mission in the figures ranging
: post-Columbia era. from $450 million
: to $2 billion)
: 1 LHC 10 shuttles. Equal to $10 billion
: the construction cost (some estimates
: of the Large Hadron Collider. only count
: $6 billion in expenses)
: 1 Apollo 10 LHCs. Equal to $100 billion
: the cost of the Apollo (and rising)
: space program in current
: dollars. Also roughly equal
: to space station cost, or the
: cost of returning to the moon.
: 1 budget 30 Apollos. Equal to $3 trillion
: the White House's (actually,
: federal budget proposal. $3.1 trillion
: for FY 2009)
: Does all this make you feel better about the $700 billion, or
: worse?
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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