His goal is Mars.Mr Musk's original plan, conceived in the months after the sale of PayPal, was to launch a small unmanned probe, costing around $20m, that would have landed on Mars and sent back pictures of a few plants growing inside a sealed environment.
However, Clinton has made no secret of her belief that then-FBI Director James Comey's announcement just before the election that the bureau was investigating potential new evidence in the lengthy email probe cost her the White House.
Another example was the potential use of the practice profiles developed by the private sector partner to probe cost and value of obstetrics services (particularly for pre term monitoring admissions) and the possibility of primary care based fracture reviews.
Such probes cost a lot: an estimated $1 billion in the case of Germany's Siemens.
The TB test, called a line probe assay, costs less than $8 and detects mutations in bacterial DNA linked to drug resistance.
From a laboratory perspective, Xpert MTB/RIF cost $14.93/sample and the MTBDR plus line probe assay cost $23.46/sample, compared to $16.88/sample using conventional automated liquid culture-based methods.
But he soon discovered that launching his probe would cost a minimum of $30m, and that started him thinking.Unlike computing, where costs have been driven steadily down and performance continuously increases, the rocket-launching business has made little progress since the 1960s.
For example, Gravity Probe B cost USD750M and took over 50 years of development [87], whilst the Hubble Space Telescope cost USD4.7B to launch [88] and 20 years of development though these represent extreme examples of large space missions.
Eckert's summary of Garcia's probe – which cost £6m and took 18 months – effectively cleared Russia and Qatar of serious wrongdoing, despite the former being unable to provide any email evidence because they claimed it had been wiped and a list of concerns over the latter.
This new approach has already achieved some notable scientific successes, such as the Pathfinder mission (which sent a robotic rover to Mars last year for a mere $266m) and the Clementine probe (which cost $75m, and found evidence of ice on the Moon).
