Incremental Growth in Space ( Cato speculate?)

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 06:44 PM, jdr7181 wrote:

> 1. Have you ever heard of a company having success in an undeveloped
> market?

Have you ever heard of a successful product where all deliveries to to
the factory cost $10,000/lb for shipping? Where commuting to work cost
$500,000,000 for seven workers for 7-10 days of work (ISS crew of 3
spends most of their time fixing the station)?

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.