Forty to fifty years ago, space stations and commercial space travel were part and parcel of nearly everyone’s vision of the 21st century. We all remember the “Pan Am space-plane” arriving at the enormous rotating space station in the early moments of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But 2001 has come and gone, and today’s state-of-the-art is the 1970s vintage space shuttle design and the cramped and incredibly expensive International Space Station.
As so often happens, economic realities have kicked the best-laid plans of mice and men right in the head. However, that’s all in the process of changing. As we’ll discuss, fundamentally new technologies are now emerging that promise to make space tourism and other large-scale space applications a money-making reality within the next quarter century.
Let’s start by examining the trends that will enable us to exploit this “final economic frontier” as well as the implications of doing so.
Both the private sector and government are enthusiastic about making the most of space. Exciting new possibilities like space tourism, zero-G factories, giga-watt solar energy plants operating 24/7, and claiming “the ultimate high ground” for defense systems each represent the basis for an embryonic industry.
When these are combined with the benefits that could be derived by doing a better job in areas like natural resource management, weather forecasting, global communications, and military reconnaissance, the enormous potential of space commercialization becomes apparent.
Today, small but important steps are being taken by government and private industry towards making space more accessible to everyone for a wide range of applications. The Bush administration recently laid out its vision of a permanent moon base and a manned mission to Mars. The Federal Aviation Administration and lawmakers are drafting a new licensing system that would let entrepreneurs start offering sightseeing flights to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, perhaps by 2007. And entrepreneurs are busily designing, assembling, and testing private rocket ships that may eventually carry paying passengers into orbit.
A growing number of industry enthusiasts foresee a subsequent era, starting around 2010 to 2015, in which launch vehicles could deliver...
