Smells Like Teen Spirit

Al Globus wrote:

>The guts of this is right on -- building castles in the sky doesn't
>work if you can't get to the sky. What we, and every other aspect of
>space development, really need is cheap, safe, routine access to Low
>Earth Orbit. That's where the vast majority of the money, time, and
>effort needs to be and it isn't.
>
It isn't? We have the space elevator people, the huge variety of X-prize
people (is the Rocket Guy shooting for the X-prize?), the Elon Musk
big-dumb-booster people, NASA's OSP and next-generation reusable
(formerly space launch initiative), the EELV's from Boeing and LockMart,
Orbital Science's various air-launched efforts, SeaLaunch, the Russian
ICBM-based launch platforms, not to mention the Indian and Chinese
manned and unmanned programs, and the new Ariane's. And we have the
failed Beal Aerospace, Rotary rocket - and what happened to Kistler and
the others? I find it hard to believe anyone thinks we need more
volunteers to put time and effort into new projects in low-cost access
to space right now. Somebody to maybe coordinate some of these different
efforts and get them to cooperate a bit might be a good idea, which is
perhaps what McKnight is proposing.

Of the three things you think are needed, it's not time and effort, but
money, and that means commercial markets for your services, that is the
real sticking point right now - the X-prize contenders hope the
sub-orbital tourism market will bring in sufficient funds; other people
are looking at other markets. And that's what this proposal was really
all about - creating a huge new market for space transportation and
infrastructure, by establishing a legal basis for celestial property
ownership, where law is currently very murky. It's not building castles
in the sky - it's building markets in the sky to support people working
here on Earth.

And obviously space settlement requires transport - the space settlement
initiative being discussed here (read the details at
http://www.spacesettlement.org/) has regular transport to the site in
question as a condition for making a claim.

Arthur Smith