Author Topic: Space. The Final Frontier.  (Read 75540 times)

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Offline Coladar

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Re: Space. The Final Frontier.
« Reply #200: June 19, 2012, 12:15:55 AM »
Recently read "The Idea Factory" (history of Bell Labs)...the telephone industry probably did more to drive the US economy (and war effort) from the 30s to 50s than any other sector (including automobiles, shipbuilding, and heavy manufacturing).  Amazing how voice transmission is  essentially a freebee these days.   

Well, voice over lines, yeah. The infrastructure is all built and has been for decades, now it's all support and maintance, so costs plummet and it's pure profit. Likewise, now we are building our wireless infrastructure, and it's expensive as crap. Fifty years from now, and the towers have all been built, it'll drop in price to nothing too. It's all about paying to establish the initial beachhead. After that, it costs next to nothing. Same with space flight really. If we ever really get off earth it'll be crazy expensive, then once things have been built, space stations or moon bases or whatever, it'll be crazy cheap.