SENS, on the other hand, is speculative, and needs $ hundreds of millions at the minimum to get to work.

If you're talking about the cost of R&D, I don't think so. A lot of the work of SENS is just to find the important developments amid the mass of biological research happening every day in thousands of universities and companies. Certainly, once you grasp that big picture, you can spot gaps and call for them to be filled with specific new research, and that costs money. But I see SENS as mostly an exercise in providing a coherent strategic vision for rejuvenation research (and that's a vision that needs constant updating).