About three months ago, I had a couple phone conversations with Charles Homans, an editor at the Washington Monthly, who had contacted me as a result of reading The New Atlantis piece. Apparently, he’s been doing a lot of other research in the interim. This long article is the apparent result of it.
7 thoughts on “Can Private Providers Save Space?”
Comments are closed.
Both links go to your New Atlantis piece.
Rand, your second and first links are the same.
Sorry, fixed.
Good article overall, especially for something in the non-technical part of the media. That said, there seemed to be a bit of cognitive dissonance going on with her treatment of unmanned vs manned spaceflight. But very well balanced overall, and he got a lot of details right that are usually screwed up.
~Jon
Yes, that was a pretty good article. It correctly focuses on the key question of “why”.
The article was rather mixed. It was very good at pointing out some of the perils and pitfalls of the commercial space initiative. The article completely misses the point about space exploration.
beyond the taxi trips to the space station, the pickings [for putting people in orbit] are pretty slim
This is exactly why destination is important. The first destination is orbit. We don’t have enough space stations to service. Which is why doing what we can to help Bigelow to get his hotels up would provide overall benefits and in the near term.
The moon is perhaps the next destination. Bases there would have to be serviced by an increase in flights.
Ultimately, colonies in many locations will drive flight rates up.