From the Chair Force Engineer. He thinks that EML1 is a good idea, though, rather than lunar orbit rendezvous. So do I.

Boy, if you’re an old L-5er, this site sure brings back memories. I remember using many (in fact all) of those slides when I’d go around and evangelize space colonization back in the late seventies and early eighties.

[Via Phil Bowermaster, who’s not the man he once was.]

G. Scott Hubbard says that entrepreneurial space is becoming very real:

Building a new space industry requires three things: demand, access to space and a platform. In the Stanford study, where we deliberately limited the investor horizon to 5-8 years, the only truly new business case that clearly closes for profitability is suborbital tourism. In this arena, the technology has proven itself available, private funding is adequate to build the vehicles, and more than enough wealthy individuals are willing to pay $100,000 or more for a short excursion to the edge of space. Space tourism is coming.

“So what,” some say. They point out that even with generous assumptions about flight rate, the business generated by suborbital companies would still be at best a tiny blip in the estimated $180-billion global space market dominated communications satellites and traditional government missions. So why do we care? The answer lies in the huge future potential for space-based goods and services.

As Boeing’s Shaw, a former astronaut, pointed out, human space travel is such a powerful personal experience that, “the more people who go, the more will want to go.” Once space becomes accessible to tourists on a regular basis, practical industries will certainly follow. If early aviation is any guide, we can say for sure that the demand is as woefully underestimated as the development costs. Still, clever advertising companies and marketers already are exploiting space connections to capture attention, and their strategies appear to be working.

I think that he’s mistaken here, though, continuing to buy into the ongoing myth of weightless research:

My own speculation about the location of space’s version of “Sutter’s gold,” as Walker called it, is with biological experimentation in microgravity. Every living organism that we know of evolved in 1g. Science never has been able to fully examine gravity as a variable. From experiments of a few days to a few weeks in space, there are tantalizing hints of radically different gene expression, unusual lignin (a compound vital to connective tissue) growth in plants, and changed rates of disease infectivity. If one assumes extraordinary new breakthrough discoveries will occur, then advanced biotechnologies and future products will arise. It’s very sad that given our current set of U.S. space priorities, only the European and Japanese programs will be able to exploit the full potential of the ISS. However, for the right entrepreneur, setting up a biology lab on the ISS