15M or 19M, it still seems a lot for NASA to pay for a urine reconstitution system. Think about it -- one could hire a team of say, 8 recent MIT grads to design an ideal system and give them a year to do it. If they each got paid $80K/yr, we're talking a total of $640K for labor. Let's double that for materials and workspace, so in total, $1.28M. Let's just say I'm a complete idiot and have underestimated this by about 100% -- then the cost would be $2.56M. Still a fraction of what NASA paid. If the team were a private company outsourced by NASA, they could then license their tech for other purposes. I don't know what other industries could use this, perhaps sewage treatment plants?
This money could be going towards good purposes -- think of all the starving Africans we could feed, or all the air & water testing we could do to ensure American health (both mental and physical), or the number of informants we could buy in the Middle East, or who knows what. Who knows, maybe this is about more than the space program -- perhaps this is our way of making sure Russia doesn't sell their most advanced technologies off to rogue nations (or at least competing nations).
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15M or 19M, it still seems a lot for NASA to pay for a urine reconstitution system. Think about it -- one could hire a team of say, 8 recent MIT grads to design an ideal system and give them a year to do it. If they each got paid $80K/yr, we're talking a total of $640K for labor. Let's double that for materials and workspace, so in total, $1.28M. Let's just say I'm a complete idiot and have underestimated this by about 100% -- then the cost would be $2.56M. Still a fraction of what NASA paid. If the team were a private company outsourced by NASA, they could then license their tech for other purposes. I don't know what other industries could use this, perhaps sewage treatment plants?
This money could be going towards good purposes -- think of all the starving Africans we could feed, or all the air & water testing we could do to ensure American health (both mental and physical), or the number of informants we could buy in the Middle East, or who knows what. Who knows, maybe this is about more than the space program -- perhaps this is our way of making sure Russia doesn't sell their most advanced technologies off to rogue nations (or at least competing nations).