Former NASA official: NASA must shed “socialist” approach to space exploration | Ars Technica

Former NASA official: NASA must shed “socialist” approach to space exploration | Ars Technica At the same time, Musk has said repeatedly that his ultimate aim with SpaceX is to land humans—perhaps even himself—on Mars. NASA also has a program to land humans on Mars. And just as NASA is building a heavy lift rocket to begin to accomplish this, so is SpaceX. Only its Falcon Heavy rocket will likely cost about one-tenth as much to launch as NASA’s Space Launch System; it will begin flying two years sooner as well.

That's a lot of cheese they got from mining the moon.

Elon Musk uses this ancient critical-thinking strategy to outsmart everybody else | VentureBeat | Business | by Drake Baer, Business Insider

Elon Musk uses this ancient critical-thinking strategy to outsmart everybody else | VentureBeat | Business | by Drake Baer, Business Insider:
When Musk and his team were trying to estimate how much the first SpaceX rockets would cost, they could have just looked at the products on the market. But as the blog 99u points out, his team didn’t settle for that analogy-based argument. Instead, they figured out what the necessary parts of a rocket were, and then found out how much the raw materials of those parts would cost.

The result was startling: SpaceX could build a rocket for about 2% of the typical price.

Makes you wonder what the other 98% is being spent on...