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$1.5B?
BFD
doing whatever it is we did in Iraq will cost several Trillions of dollars, once it's all reckoned.
i'd rather buy a few thousand space flights than ... that.
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The Delta IV Heavy has a launch price of $254 million. Quite a bit less. The Space Shuttle was suppose to make space travel more economical. It did not.
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Maybe the Space Shuttle program helped make the Delta IV Heavy launches "cheap"... I don't know and I am not really defending the program. I always thought that ceramic tile construction was a sub-optimal design choice.
Soren Madsen
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The tiles made it work with current technology. They wanted to get the Shuttle off the ground, so sometimes had to just make it work. That is the problem with not building demonstrators. You cannot test any of the technologies for the final product without having whole design work.
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There is very little from the space shuttle that probably was used on the Delta IV. The Delta IV is the latest of a long line of Delta boosters that have one of the longest histories with a 95% success. In the first decade of the century there were two partial failures of Delta rockets where the satellite was not put in the correct orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2000%E2%80%932009)[^]), one the first launch of the Delta IV Heavy.
It is well known that the tile system was not a good design (http://www.keithcompany.com/Article%201-23.aspx[^]). There has been some work on other options (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry[^]), but I guess without a future space plane in the works, probably not a lot of work has been done on the concept. I would guess that a lot of the reason for the shuttle's economic failure comes from the tiles (it was suppose to make space flight cheap).
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...but out of Iraq we got.... wait, let me think about that one... 
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i would prefer spend that money to build beach resorts - imagine, free vacation for everyone
dev
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It's only about 3 USD per citizen, so it's maybe 1 free burger. 
Wout
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wout de zeeuw wrote: maybe 1 free burger.
But the cheeseburger would be in paradise. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Couldn't see why this was 2-voted. Countered.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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