brody@eos.UUCP (Adam Brody) (10/16/89)
Final Frontier magazine recently put the cost of space into perspective in down to earth terms. While this year's budget request for Freedom seems large at $2.1 billion, that's roughly on fourth the amount americans spend on pornography each year and half what they spend on perfume. "The cost of the entire Voyager program from launch in 1977 through Voyager 2's encounter with Neptune in 1989 comes to $556 million. That's just six million more than junk bond trader Michael Milken 'earned' as personal income in 1987....Moviegoers shelled out a combined total of $503 million through the end of 1987 to Star Wars, Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back." Stealth bomber costs $531 million and current plan is to build 132 of them. "One space shuttle flight--if you divide NASA's 1989 budget for shuttle operations by the number of missions flown this fiscal year--costs $400 million. That's about the same amount Coca-Cola spends each year on advertising....direct mail advertisers spent a total of $19.1 billion in 1987...roughly twice the amount NASA spent in that same year." NASA's ten-year SETI program is priced at about $80 million, about the same as the Pentagon's 1986 phone bill ($84.8 million).