Smells Like Teen Spirit

Arthur,

Of the list of rocket providers you have mentioned,
none IMO fit the criteria of CATS. I would not even
consider the space elevator people at this point. The
X-prize is great start but just a start. Musk is a
niche market that competes with Orbital. nasa's SLI
program is pretty much a bust and OSP doesn't fit the
CATS principle. Its beginning to look like another
expensive architecture and still only deals with LEO
access (something I would like to see us get out of).
EELV's and Arianne are still very expensive. Chinese
and Indian are still in their infancy, too early to
speculate. Russian ICBM's are probably the cheapest
and most reliable but there is definitely some foreign
policy issues there.

Right now it seems like we have a chicken and egg
scenario. We need CATS to develop a space market, but
we need a space market to bring about CATS.

As far as the property issue, I really don't think
that is holding anyone back. We've pretty much have a
model right now (based off telecom sats) that what we
put into space, we retain ownership of. I think it is
premature to talk about ownership of the
Moon/Mars/asteroids. When the technology has matured
to the point where we can think of exploiting these
resources, then I believe we can have a good
discussion. Though if history is a judge, it will
probably end up being a first come first claim on the
asteroids.

Ryan Z