On the PBS show "Nova" tonight...

> From: DOUG MAY
> What other ideas do we have for early industries that are
> reasonably affordable and can be used to create an economy in
> space?

Hubble was state of the art when it was built in the early 80s. Build a few
Hubble knock offs and sell telescope time. With a five year waiting period
for HST, there's definately a market here. If some of them can point down at
Earth without burning out their CCDs then Google might rent one full time to
fill in gaps in GoogleEarth. Enviromental groups and otehr too. NASA has
demonstrated semi-smart automated satellites. Reduce ground staff to a few
people per satellite and you should be able to make a profit.

Knick Knacks. Bring 10kg of asteroid rock back, cut it into a million
pieces, and sell them for $100 each. Sell the resulting dust at $200 per
milligram and claim it has medicinal properties. You never know. Someone
might fall for it. If you launch at $90M then you make...

Hypersonic flight test bed. At present sounding rockets are the only way to
reliably test things at mach 5-12. Of course we already know that *rockets*
work quite happily at these speeds, but few people are more willing to stick
their fingers in their ears than research scientists. This can be a side by
side market with space tourism.

Persoanlly I think the best market would be selling 'utility' reusable
launch vehicles the same way Boeing sells 747s. Many nations would buy
simply to keep up with the jones. Others would buy for R&D. Others would buy
for the utility of not being dependent on foreign powers for space access.
If the launch system doesn't cost much to run ($100M a year or so) many
groups would want one. At say $500M each that could bring in a lot of money.
Sell ten and that's $5B, twenty and that's $10B. How much are development
costs again?

John