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>From OTA@S1-A Tue Dec  1 03:20:21 1981

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 2 : Issue 46

Today's Topics:
			   SPACE Digest V2 #44
			   long-term gigabucks
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From: HAROLD@MIT-ML
Date: 11/30/81 11:23:26
Subject: SPACE Digest V2 #44

HAROLD@MIT-ML 11/30/81 11:23:26 Re: SPACE Digest V2 #44
To: Space-Enthusiasts at MIT-MC
I also seem to be getting two copies of the space digest.  This seems to
be a new bug as I was only getting one up to now.

Harold Goldberger

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Date: 30 Nov 1981 22:18:23-PST
From: decvax!utzoo!henry at Berkeley
Subject: long-term gigabucks

"...NO company has the financial resources to plunge billions of
dollars into something that will take decades to pay itself off."

Nonsense!  Still worse:  ignorance!

Boeing put over one billion dollars of ITS OWN MONEY (not borrowed!)
into the development of the 747 and its production line.  It is a
verifiable fact that it took roughly a decade for this investment
to start paying off (747 #400 was figured to be the break-even point).
Nor was this a one-time fluke;  they have recently done the same thing
again, on a still bigger and costlier scale (several billion this
time), with the 757 and 767.  Again, most of the money was not even
borrowed;  it was $2-3 billion cash in hand!  Anyone want to bet the
payback time will be any shorter?

Boeing may not be QUITE in the do-it-yourself-space-shuttle league,
but they clearly are not far away from it.  Boeing, incidentally, has
expressed interest in buying the STS from NASA if/when NASA decides
to get out of the space-trucking business.

And if that example isn't good enough, most public-utility financing
is by private companies, and multibillion-dollar investments with
payoff times measured in decades are routine business there.  Some of
the projects, like the James Bay hydroelectric project, are already
well up in the tens-of-billions bracket:  that's Project-Apollo size.

						Henry

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End of SPACE Digest
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