The Maine Solution - Updated

Mark makes a good point. Over the years I've come to accept that the problem is not that we don't do more in space because it's so expensive. It's soexpensive because we're not doing more in space. In my current thinking, the government could find much worse ways to spenda few billionthan to say, "We're going to fund the first demonstrator SPS, whether the first one is profitable or not, and irregardless of present launch costs. On the other hand, the launch contracts will be awarded competitively, and to more than one competitor at a time. The percentages of who gets how much of the businesswill be constantly adjusted in accordance with who is delivering on cost reduction." (I originally wrote "cost reduction and reliability" but itshould be up to each competitor to determine for themselveswhat reliability level confers the bestcost reduction.) If a guaranteed market suddenly opened up for a launch a week, and then a few years down the road even a launch a day, entrepreneurs would promptlybuild the launch systems to support it, and we would then see the cost reductions we all yearn for. It's not the implementation of this or that new technology, it's the traffic model. SPS systems "like" to be big. Some researchers have viewed this as aproblem which needs to be solved (searching for a terraced approach), but in the above scenario, being big is a good thing.