while true

CNN.com - Private craft heads for space - Jun 21, 2004:: NASA might not have enough funds to continue to go to space the way Bush envisions. This is great news for those who think NASA has had too much money and too few accomplishments for their own good in the past 30 years. All manned flights should be outsourced to firms like Scaled Composites, who will certainly have the cheapest boosting mechanism around. This will scale the flights so that a private industry based on space tourism will be able to lift off. This will probably be expensive, but far cheaper than the $50K/Kg price tag now.

Then, that industry will be given a boost with some reason industrial motivation to be in space: always-on, high-power, and ZERO pollution solar cell energy collection, trillions of tons of exposed valuable minerals, escape pods for extinction-level-event problems on earth, or perfect manufacturing environments to make fusion possible.

And THEN, Joe-Sixpack and I can spend a weekend in space because the flights will be affordable. If this doesn’t happen by 2020, I will be upset.

Note that the CNN article waits till paragraph 16 (at the time of this posting) to mention the company that built SpaceShipOne. This doesn’t exactly help broadcast the exceptional private nature of the flight, nor promote the company.