Never, Ever Trust A Science Story in Major Media like NBC
Most journalists become journalism majors because they had vowed after high school never, ever to take a math or science class again. At Princeton we had distribution requirements and you should have seen the squealing from English and History majors at having to take one science course (I don't remember ever hearing the reverse from engineering majors).
It should not surprise you, then, that most media is awful at science journalism. I held off making a comment on this for 3 days figuring it was a typo and they would quickly fix it, but apparently not. This fits in well with my thesis that the art of sanity-checking numbers has been lost (I added the bold):
The space elevator is the Holy Grail of space exploration,” says Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City College of New York and a noted futurist. “Imagine pushing the ‘up’ button of an elevator and taking a ride into the heavens. It could open up space to the average person.”
Kaku isn’t exaggerating. A space elevator would be the single largest engineering project ever undertaken and could cost close to $10 billion to build. But it could reduce the cost of putting things into orbit from roughly $3,500 per pound today to as little as $25 per pound, says Peter Swan, president of International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), based in Santa Ana, California.
LOL. The planning for such a structure would cost more than $10 billion. There is no way that a space elevator can be built for just 1/10 the price of a high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco. Even at $10 trillion dollars, or 3 orders of magnitude more, I would nod my head and think that was a pretty inexpensive price.
