There's a very friendly article toward NewSpace in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required, sorry) based on the reporter's interview with Clark Lindsey. It notes the disconnect between the science-fiction reality in which we live in many respects, and the woefully slower pace of space development, relative to what we thought we'd have:

...the Pluto debate was another unhappy reminder that except for a few astronauts, we're stuck down here on Earth long after sci-fi paperbacks predicted we would have been occupying moon bases or exploring Mars or mining asteroids. It's not as if we haven't seen an enormous amount of technological progress in recent decades. In some ways, we live in a science-fiction world: We carry massive music collections in our pockets, conduct real-time conversations with people across the globe for fractions of a cent and can spend hours playing (and even making money) in hypnotically detailed virtual worlds. Pure cyberpunk, down to the jihadis exchanging deadly tips on hidden message boards.

But at the same time, the science fiction of "out there" seems stillborn -- 25 years after the first space shuttle took off, it's news if it returns with all aboard safe and sound. Space elevators and moon bases? C'mon, kid: Your square-jawed rocket engineers of future histories past are now tattooed, pierced software engineers coding social-networking sites. Pluto's a faraway place in more ways than one.

Or is that too pessimistic? Is there another way into space, one that isn't dependent on the fitful attention of big government and the iffy performance of big bureaucracies?

Clark S. Lindsey, for one, is optimistic. Mr. Lindsey is a Java programmer and space enthusiast who runs the blog www.spacetransportnews.com. Last summer, a Real Time column being decidedly mopey about the future prompted a letter from him, contending that we're at the start of a private-industry-led era in space development, one that would develop more quickly than many disappointed sci-fi fans like me thought. (His letter, and other reflections on space exploration, are available here.)

...As sketched out by Mr. Lindsey, it sounds convincing -- aided, perhaps, by the fact that I desperately want to believe it. Once thing that does seem certain is this: If we're to shed our disappointment, we have to let go of space exploration as it was, and accept how it will be. Don't think of the race to the moon as a first step to Mars and beyond -- that's a perspective best left to history books that will be written centuries from now, if we're lucky. Instead, consider the space race of the 1960s a mutation of cold-war competition, a peaceful contest that caught the imagination of a more-uniform society that united behind it. Put that big-government model from your mind, and the relatively small scale of private-sector efforts to get into orbit may catch your imagination, instead of just arousing cynicism and disappointment.

Notice the comparisons in the first paragraph you quote: to Ipods, phone/VoIP, and digital gaming. I'm pretty sure the "mopey" column last summer was the 'Real Time' column of 8/15/05, which -- like this one -- compared (lack of) progress in space to headlong progress in IT.

I won't bother to argue with that if the point of the comparison is "slow government programs vs. sprightly private enterprise"... which one expects on ideological grounds alone in the WSJ, as well as from much of NewSpace. But the comparison is used so often, by so many, that I'm convinced a lot of the time the goal is to smuggle in a second implication: that there are Moore's-law-like, PC-like, Internet-like growth rates just waiting to kick in once we start Doing Space Right.

I call bull$#!+ on that. Why haven't jetliners or oil tankers or combines or steamshovels gotten orders of magnitude faster, smaller, and cheaper as IT technologies have? Because they all deal not with information (which can be instantiated equally well, or better, at any scale from vacuum tubes down to transistor gates), but with large and irreducible masses and energies. As I wrote to Hanrahan and Fry after last summer's column, "Suppose Intel could fabricate 10,000 tiny rockets on a wafer. That would do exactly nothing to make access to space cheaper."

The fact is that we already have our Moore's Law benefit for space: it's in every comm, remote sensing, and nav satellite, every scientific probe and rocket avionics package, in the form of circuitry that does much more, more reliably, per kg than it did fifty years ago.

I believe with you, Rand, that NewSpace can find important savings in development, management, operations -- eventually, above all, in high flight rates. But to the extent the IT comparison suggests to lay people that the IBM, Apple, 3Com and Dell of NewSpace are going to take rockets onto a technological curve like that of IT, it's deeply misleading. Yeah, you know better, as does anyone who thinks about it for a moment, yet it's become a meme that won't die. That it keeps appearing so often tells me that (1) a lot of spacers are also into computing, and (2) that they don't mind doing some misleading -- in a good cause, of course.

It's notable that air transportation prices have declined by 1.3 orders of magnitude in the past 65 years and that railway transportation costs have fallen by a factor of 100 ( two orders of magnitude) in 150 years and more than a factor of ten in the seventy years from 1890 to 1960.

Space development does not need the seven orders of magnitude achieved by the computer industry. The projected two orders will do nicely and the smart money is that two orders are achievable with chemical rockets.

The analogy with a "mature" railroad industry in 1890 certainly suggests that it is achievable. And they weren't even throwing the locomotives away after each use.

I can pick some serious nits with comparisons of space access to other forms of transportation -- but hey, almost *any* analogy would be more appropriate than IT.

Braue's Law of Space Industrialization: Think of something that you can only do in space, wait twenty years, and you'll be able to do it better, faster, cheaper, and easier on the ground.

Lee Valentine: 65 years ago, aluminum structures and turbosupercharging were the hot new technologies on the aircraft front. Jet engines were just about at the point where they could run for a whole hour before burning up.