Bootstrapping Hawaii

>
> Ballooning is profitable too- in fact, it's not a bad paradigm.
You
> don't exactly go anywhere, but people are quite willing to pay for
a
> trip anyway. You get a nice badge and everything. Same with
suborbital,
> except you get your astronaut wings.

I agree with you. Good points. My only rebuttal with respect to
disagreement centers on one word: Bootstrapping.

>
> > You get on a jet to go someplace in order to do something.
>
> Yes, but you can also get on a cruise ship and do nothing. Think
of
> orbit as doing a cruise around the world. Zero-g is thrown in at
no
> extra cost.

Where's the bootstrapping aspect? You suddenly have a bunch of companies with rocketry experience. The suborbital market is limited. The orbital market is less so. Some of them are going to go for it- it's the best way to grow their business.
Don't you think that tourism involving the general public has more
stringent safety requirements than professional activities? Can you
just strap a tourist into a deep-sea diver's suit and send him down
into a mixed gas zone with no training? No. So give them the training. Somehow I think that people going to spend more than a million dollars will be prepared to take a course.
Can you put tourists into
untested planes? Why does the FAA require years of certification?
Actually, they don't recognize the 'c-word' (as the FAA representatives put it) for rockets; and suborbital vehicles are not going to be certified. There's a recognition that expecting space vehicles to reach commercial air vehicle standards at this stage is completely unrealistic. They are looking at certifying the tourists more than anything.
Do there exist any spacecraft that are safe for tourists?
There exist tourists prepared to go on the existing spacecraft; so in that sense, yes. There are other tourist industries that kill as many people, for example climbing Everest.
> > it still
> > needs a destination, otherwise it's just a new-fangled balloon.
>
> No, because orbit is a destination. People want to stay up for a
week or
> more ideally, and they are going to be prepared to pay.

So they'll stay in the space vehicle. Maybe initially; or perhaps not.
Orbit is the destination, and
that's fine. My rebuttal once again, Bootstrapping. This doesn't
offer any help for subsequent endeavors.
Launch cost! Orbital infrastructure! Commercial skills! Investor comfort levels! Technology pushes! In situ-resource utilisation! (hint: is it cheaper to pick a rock off Deimos or the earth and put it in LEO? How much rock do you need for radiation shielding?)

Lunar trips!
> That really needs a hotel.

Yes, that is a destination. Hopefully it is sufficient in scale to
support ancillary ventures. From this there is at least the
potential of future growth.

The point, from my perspective anyway, of this series of posts, was
how to bootstrap, not how to make a buck with some space themed
businesses.
Making a buck is not against the law. Not making a buck (like NASA is doing) probably should be. NASA cannot open up the high frontier; and there is ample evidence of this. For example when the Shuttle was on the design board they told all these fairy stories about how cheap it was going to be.

Now you might naively think as I did, that they had just overestimated the difficulty. Apparently not, according to the guy that ran the Shuttle program, they knowingly lied, and didn't even try to achieve any of the numbers that they quoted. And people like Gerard O'Neill were asked to back their program based on the quoted numbers. But of course they lied and that killed any chance of it starting to happen whilst he was alive.
TangoMan