It's annoying how many commentators and pundits are pulling cost numbers out of their asses when they talk about this space initiative. I wrote Sullivan a letter this morning but I doubt it'll ever be published.

It amazes me how people are pulling numbers out of thin air (or the anal data store) to guess how much Bush's space initiative will cost. I've heard numbers ranging from $100 billion to $1 trillion, and none of them have any possible basis in fact.

Imagine telling someone you want to build a house. Would you be surprised if they instantly shot back that the house would cost $10 million? You have not even began to specify where the house will be built, how big it'll be, what materials you want to use in the construction, etc., so where did their price estimate come from other than thin air? The same is true for the space initiative.

NASA's budget is a little over $15 billion out of a $2.2 trillion federal budget. Bush wants to reallocate the money now being spent on the Shuttle and ISS towards a new goal, plus kicking in perhaps an additional billion dollars a year. That comes to about $5-6 billion a year over 20 years, giving us about $100-120 billion to work with without a significant increase in the space budget.

Sure, we could eliminate all space spending and kill NASA. That would fund the rest of the federal government for about 2 days. Are things really that dire? Honestly, I don't think so.