The first 200 miles is halfway to anywhere
I read this in Harvard Business Review and found the idea fascinating:
“The reason Mars and the space business are out of reach is that no
one has yet solved a fundamental problem: the cost of propelling
weight into orbit. Engineers like to say that low Earth orbit is
‘halfway to any destination in the solar system.’ The energy required
to overcome Earth’s gravity and place an object 200 miles above sea
level is roughly the same as that required to send it from there to
any of the planets.”
Surely that’s a metaphor for lots of other problems.
