Florida Today article on Skylab B

Derek Lyons wrote:
Charles Buckley wrote:


Derek Lyons wrote:

"rschmitt23" wrote:


As we near the 20th anniversary of President Reagan's January 1984
initiation of the permanent space station program and reflect on our present
situation (shuttle grounded, ISS half-completed, $30B spent so far on ISS,
runout cost of ISS estimated at ~$100B, all in current dollars), it's
interesting to recall what one could do at one time 30 years ago with a
$10B budget, ~5 years of schedule and a different type of space station
paradigm.


That comparision is more than a bit misleading, as Skylab's '$10B'
budget was greatly eased by the amount of hardware retrieved from the
scrap heap and it's generally low goals.


Would a reasonable analogy be that ISS was salvaged from Freedom?
Just do a comparison from 1993..



Not even remotely reasonable.

D.


In what way? Are you claiming that ISS did not recycle a lot of
Freedom equipment, or are you saying that ISS includes Freedom
costs?

Just because you don't like the comparson, does not mean it
is invalid. ISS piggybacked off a lot of design/hardware from
Freedom and did not have to start from scratch.

Take your pick on how to draw the lines, but ISS is more
expensive either as a stand-alone or as a leveraged piece of
hardware - even allowing for inflation.