I feel the it will be like early explorers, whether they traveled by foot, mule, wagon or boat. You can only bring back what you can carry, so you want the lightest and the most quanity. For me that can only mean gem stone mining at ancient volcanoes and asteroid crash sites on the moon and mars. BUT, as I have said repeatedly on this site, you can not do ANY of that UNTIL the PROPERTY RIGHTS issue is finally settled. Think about it, if you could legally own lunar land and someone shouts “Astronaut G.A. Custer just found diamonds laying on the ground in shackelton crater” what would be the effect? Billionaires would be buying up MINING RIGHTS left and right AND would INSTANTLY have ASSETS ON THE BOOKS. BANKABLE mining rights is what PAYS FOR the mining equipment. The value of a mine is it’s FUTURE POTENTIAL and that future potential can be used as collateral for a loan to build BDB (big dumb boosters) and start the process.

I know that. I even agree with your implication that Mir or something like it would have been a better option. But, Mir isn’t what we have and we should use what we do have, not what we should have.

he’s playing one hell of an expensive dice game.

Again, I don’t disagree with this. But, it’s the game we have. We play it, or wait until something better may, or may not, come along.

— Donald

Or as Mike Griffin said, “We don’t cancel the Navy.”

For people with short memories, orbital tourism was also gearing up when MIR was up there, not due to ISS.

If anyone in this market relies on ISS to close his business case, he’s playing one hell of an expensive dice game.

This, I fully agree with.

And this,

and pushes NASA towards being a customer rather than a supplier of services, especially launches

But, this I dont,

This would translate to a space policy that focuses on basic infrastructure and technology development – as opposed to specific goals like a return to the Moon

The problem is, as the Space Station / COTS experience has shown, basic infrastructure and technology development are best achieved with a goal in mind, a clear political and economic market. We’ve spent thirty years failing to reduce the cost of access to orbit with various projects from the Shuttle to NASP to X-30, et al, that had exactly one thing in common: the lack of a reason for them to exist. The instant we had the Space Station as a market, it became politically and economically justifiable for the govenment to subsidize access to it via COTS, which I (maybe over-optimistically) see as the first real chance we’ve had at dramatic cost reductions in all that time.

— Donald

— Donald

I wasn’t suggesting we ignore it. I just get worried when I see it painted as the only option.

Okay, this is really off-topic, so I’ll make this my last reply in this thread.

Unless you seriously believe we’re stuck with open-loop life support and, more significantly, are condemned to using chemical rockets as our main means of propulsion, I really cannot see how you can justify this statement.

“In the absense of an oxygen trade, we need something else, and, as many cynics here and elsewhere have pointed out, nothing comes to mind. I’d love to hear your ideas.”

I really have no idea what the killer app. will be that gets us out there and actually believe there should not be one, since it’s too much like putting all our eggs in one basket. What I’d like to see is a an environment where LOTS of different ventures are being pursued and let market forces select the best in a Darwinian manner. This would translate to a space policy that focuses on basic infrastructure and technology development – as opposed to specific goals like a return to the Moon – and pushes NASA towards being a customer rather than a supplier of services, especially launches.

The Space Station is there, right now today, so we should use that as our current market to try and get started with entreprenurial launch vehicle development. The station is also a larger market, or will be one the Shuttle program is ended, than any of the other likely markets in the near term, or all of them collectively. It is a new and growing market, as opposed to the existing LEO and GEO markets, which are static. It makes no sense at all to ignore the existing Space Station market for something that may (or may not) exist in the future.

We need what does exist, rather than what should exist or we’d like to exist in an ideal world.

— Donald

Though this is drifting off-topic somewhat, it’s worth remembering that Elon Musk established SpaceX well before COTS and was clearly aiming to service the GEO comsat market. Moreover, the slew of entrepreneurial ventures that arose in the mid-1990’s was in direct response to proposals for LEO constellations (primarily Teledesic). Had any of them succeeded, they would very likely have put us very close to or even beyond the point where reduced launch costs and more responsive manifesting would have closed the business case for a quite a few new space-based commercial venture like space business parks.

So, although the ISS and VSE/ESAS could serve to stimulate the development of space-based commerce by increasing the launch market, they certainly aren’t unique and so should not be seen as the principal rationale for future commercial space policy.