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interesting : from http://www.worldspaceflight.com/america/shuttles/overview.htm i get $500m. does that seem right? so how much do folk think a new hubble would cost to design, build, launch?

It was actually 1.5 billion, and 100 million is a low ball figure for the cost of a shuttle launch.

Being a purely politically funded venture, nailing down the cost is difficult, but varies.

$300 million
$600 million
$500 million
$55 million incremental, $1.3 billion when you include facilities, research, engineering, etc...

If you take a rough midpoint and say $500 million per maintenance, the break even point would be three missions. Now, a huge portion of a satellite's cost is the R&D just to design the thing. If you produce multiple ones, the cost drops substantially. Produce multiple hubbles and soon they'd cost under a billion each. Meanwhile you can still do a great deal of updating on the ground.

I'll admit that I'd prefer to scrap the shuttle entirely, replacing it with boosters, dedicated personal carriers, and source maintenance missions from a space station. This would hopefully drastically reduce the cost of maintaining it, and might change the equations again.

It was actually 1.5 billion, and 100 million is a low ball figure for the cost of a shuttle launch.

Being a purely politically funded venture, nailing down the cost is difficult, but varies.

$300 million
$600 million
$500 million
$55 million incremental, $1.3 billion when you include facilities, research, engineering, etc...

If you take a rough midpoint and say $500 million per maintenance, the break even point would be three missions. Now, a huge portion of a satellite's cost is the R&D just to design the thing. If you produce multiple ones, the cost drops substantially. Produce multiple hubbles and soon they'd cost under a billion each. Meanwhile you can still do a great deal of updating on the ground.

I'll admit that I'd prefer to scrap the shuttle entirely, replacing it with boosters, dedicated personal carriers, and source maintenance missions from a space station. This would hopefully drastically reduce the cost of maintaining it, and might change the equations again.

>>the creation may last longer than humanity itself.

> How could that be? Somebody needs to sysadmin Google's datacenters or man the powerstations that supply Google's power

Think where our tech will be in 100 years. Petabytes of data will be as easy to handle as post-it notes. At the very least, today's web archives will be poured over by scholars, compulsive horders, and seekers after classical porn.

Certain artifacts, such as deep space probes are likely to survive tens of millions of years. Whatever humanity may be after that span of time, it won't be humanity any more than we, today, are Cro-Magnonity.

The Shuttle fleet was supposed to have a civilian and a military side. When the Shuttle was designed it was supposed to be used by the Air Force as well as NASA. The design included features specifically demanded by the Air Force and not needed by NASA. The Air Force then bailed from the project, leaving a system that was much less useful to NASA and much more expensive to run. See http://www.worldspaceflight.com/america/shuttles/o verview.htm

Many of the problems with the Shuttle result from a misguided attempt to combine military and civilian space programs. NASA was left with the resulting mess and expense. Don't blame NASA for a situation it was forced into.

According to this site The space shuttle costs are 5 times projected costs even allowing for inflation:

Initial hopes set the cost of each mission in the range of (US)$10 to (US)$20 million. Allowing for inflation, that would equate to about (US)$100 million today. Actual costs have been running (US)$500 million per mission. Turn around time between flights was initially planned to be about two weeks. It now typically takes several months.

So why should we believe the government has mended it inefficient ways and $10 billion estimate is correct?

Personally, I think we would be alot better off to have Burt Rutan get a crack at this first.

Not exactly. Bear in mind that after 1989, Americans are allowed to consider Russians as people too.

I count 902 Formula 1 drivers, according to this page.
Contrast this with space flight. According to this site (Click on "Statistics". Sadly, I couldn't find information this current / complete on NASA's own site), only 434 humans have flown in space as of December 7, 2002.

Yes, I would call that a hand full. Especially as I'm not certain as to how complete that F-1 list is. Then again, I wouldn't balk at calling 902 people out of the history of the entire world a hand full either.