Another stupid analogy. They are endless. It is not downtown manhattan and they are not semi-trucks. Nowhere close. Try again.

You’d do well to bone up on Skylab. It makes the ISS look like a two decade porkfest.

“Skylab was launched in one afternoon.”

Gee, is that your measure of success for a space station?

I think most people would say it’s the amount of work that can be done, not that it took one launch to put it in space.

By that measure you’ll never be able to build something bigger than your largest available launcher, so I guess you don’t want rotating space stations or lunar cities to get built?

Using that logic, we would never live in houses bigger than tractor trailers.

I’m glad I don’t live in your world, and I’m also glad the world ignores your advice.

Skylab was launched in one afternoon. That fact alone makes it better than the monstrous farce called ISS. You need to think about that before giving others inferior advice about inferior launch vehicles.

Why do you persist with idea that somehow NASA is an independant enity devoid of it’s ownership?

NASA and EVERYTHING it does is the property of the people of the USA. That includes American business. It is mandated to push it’s technology into the American economy through American businesses.

There shouldn’t be a thank you to NASA for doing what they are mandated to do. The idea that NASA tries to roadblock commercial development of what they preceive as THEIR business is the crime.

NASA should have been buying commercial seats 30 years ago, if they had we wouldn’t have the mess we have to deal with now.

Straw man, no one here is proposing that. The very small launch vehicles are intended to reduce launch prices for people by enough to make commercial manned spaceflight a reality and to reduce launch prices for propellant (or water, polyethylene slabs, etc) by enough to make large scale exploration affordable to government space agencies. Launching spaceships would be a job for EELV class vehicles, which counts as conservative hardware.

Also, conservative vs synergy with commercial spaceflight is a false dichtotomy. We can do extensive exploration and have enormous synergy with commercial manned spaceflight with use of very conservative hardware. It’s a myth that the choice is between HLV and lot of R&D – not that lots of R&D would be a bad idea or anything.

“As yet no one and I repeat no one, has been flown to orbit on a commercial craft.”

This is getting ridiculous. Do you know who built Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle? Come on think harder than that.

“I am glad that Musk praised NASA for all its help. I think without NASA, Musk would have been hurting.”

This seems like a backward comment to me.

In reality, Musk never would have attempted the business if there wasn’t the existing huge amount of research, technology and experience available to private individuals and companies. NASA was responsible for some of it, and the DoD certainly funded their share, but it’s the totality of civilizations progress that Musk drew upon.

To assume that they only relied on NASA is short-sighted, just as it’s short-sighed to assume that NASA doesn’t rely on the innovations of their contractors for the majority of their technology. What NASA does best is cutting edge research, but there is a huge amount of work that goes into turning research into real-world applications, and NASA does not do much of that.

“My response to the 0-G comment was that probably any jet can nose into a weightless effort so why pay 200,000 for that?”

You keep forgetting that the highest point of a Virgin Galactic ride takes you to the edge of space, which “any jet” won’t.

That is the experience that Virgin Galactic is selling, and they think they will find enough people who can afford the trip, plus be a profitable business. Time will tell if they succeed, and while they’re doing it, they are stimulating the economy. Win Win