On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:18:22 +0100, in a place far, far away, Andrew
Nowicki made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

The total cost of building one hundred Dextre telerobots,
launching them into low Earth orbit, and using
them for one year is: $154M + (99 x ($41M + $20M + $9M)) =
$7,084 million = about $7 billion -- less than one
half of the annual NASA budget! Electrodynamic tethers
can provide cheap thrust in the low Earth orbit. There
will be additional cost of building a network of
terrestrial transponders -- perhaps $100 million.

I cannot think of a better way to spend $7 billion.

Fortunately, most sane people can.