The Straight Dope staffers took a pass on this one, so I’m throwing it out to the teeming 30,000 SD members. (And I thought it was a perfect Cecil question… Alas.)
OK, pretend Bill Gates decided to take his next vacation on the moon. Would he have enough money to make this happen?
- Assume Bill is willing to devote his entire wealth to this project.
- Assume he's crazy but not reckless. (I.e., he's not welding a VW bug to a booster rocket, and he plans to make the return journey.)
- Assume he can pull away a bunch of scientists from NASA (by offering free Windows upgrades) so he doesn't have to redo all the research.
I’m sure a lot more assumptions will be necessary, so go to town!
Are you talking about starting from scratch, building a rocket, launch complex, etc., his own self? Not buying a $20 million ticket and catching a ride on someone else’s rocket, only going to the Moon instead of just up in a shuttle?
I bet the Russians would take $50 million to build a rocket for him. They’d probably throw in all the Tang he could drink.
I’ll accept all scenarios. Clearly the Russians could get him up there, but to the moon? I’m talking about getting out and walking around - catching the lay of the land, checking out the local cuisine.
Let’s take this as a starting point. Assume the Russians could put him in an orbit around the moon. What would they charge? How much for a landing craft?
It seems like Bill could just recreate the exact same technology and go to the moon the same way as Armstrong and Aldrin.
Even accounting for inflation, since Bill is worth billions, it appears like he could recreate the whole Apollo program from scratch and still be wealthy.
I can’t seem to find exact figures right now, but I seem to recall that the entire space program up to Apollo 11 cost only a few billion dollars (less than ten billion). Last I heard, Bill Gates was valued at somewhere in the vicinity of 40 billion. Admittedly, he probably can’t liquidate that much (if he were to start selling off his Microsoft stock en masse, the price would drop), but then again, a lot of the research is already done and public domain (no bribery necessary), and he’s probably not working on as strict a timeline, so it should be cheaper the second time around. I’d say he could probably pull it off.
Billy would liquidate half his assets, have the govt sponsor the other half in exchange for full compliance to the anti-monoploy thing, have a stockholders selloff to inflate the price and get another 25 percent of his original worth to liscense the technology. Go to the moon, monoploize the technology he liscensed from the trip and claim all lunar resources for his new company Moon-Soft. He wont just be the richest man on earth but he would be that on the moon too.
I have no doubt that BG could get there if he really wanted to…in fact thats a damn good idea. I mean, what else is there to do with $40,000,000,000 anyway? He could probably finance the entire project from ground crew to shuttle and get there for a fraction of that, say $10,000,000,000?
