Good article

Here's a good article on space spectaculars vs. space commerce:

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2010/05/21/it%e2%80%99s-the-space-economy-stupid/

It kind of helps me to understand why it was that, back in the days when I was active on Usenet, I would find myself and Mars advocates talking past each other when comparing things like lunar resource use or SPS vs. manned expeditions to Mars. All that High Frontier stuff I was talking about was boring, so it was never going to happen. The logic they were using was: exciting goal > excited public > greater public support > more funding. But I think this article very convincingly deflates that argument by demonstrating that not only is there no reason to expect it to be that way in the future, it's not even they way it was during Apollo.

Regards,

Mike Combs