Just $10M Keeping "Red Neck Rocket Scientist" From Reaching Space

There's a reason NASA's Shuttle budget was immense, and that it takes a billionaire like Elon Musk to succeed at space entrepreneurism: It costs a lot of money to design, build, test, redesign, rebuild, retest, [rinse and repeat...] to the point where you're not being criminally reckless to put a human being in a space vehicle.

And even then, deadly accidents [wikipedia.org] happen [wikipedia.org].

The Russians do it slightly differently by emphasizing building the hardware and testing it rather than modeling, analysis and simulation, especially in the preliminary design phases. It saves a little money, but is still costly.

Put another way, if garage-built rockets could make it into space, then we'd have orbital, Lunar and asteroid colonies by now.

But one of these days, technology and materials will allow "garage" projects like this. Perhaps the time has come. I wish him luck. It takes cojones grandes to be the first. If he's patient, deliberate, extraordinarily cautious, and more than a little lucky then he can pull it off.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/ZKlZ6YY9fWQ/just-10m-keeping-red-neck-rocket-scientist-from-reaching-space

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