In its golden era of the mid-sixties, NASA talk encompassed the heady idea of a manned Mars mission by 1980. What went wrong? Or, given the debatable economic value of humans on Mars, did something – a dose of realism, perhaps – go right? A more fundamental question, which is the principal topic of this article, is: Do we even have the correct economic paradigm for space exploration and exploitation? With current launch costs at around US$200/kilo, isn’t there any cheaper way to do space business?
How NASA claimed the moon, by letting the engineers run the show
As the money dried up, NASA’s political energies became consumed in the maintenance of near-stasis
How NASA must support a web of industrial contractors to safeguard its votes on Capitol Hill
Why good new ideas go nowhere, and how this process can subvert private sector projects
From space tourism to using Soyuz as a billboard, impoverishment has driven commercial innovation at Baikonur
The Ansari X Prize, claimed in 2004 by Scaled Composites’ SpaceShip One, should be a pilot for stimulating the private sector
The commercial satellite business is the one economically viable, genuinely competitive space sector; yet here, too, there is scope to slash the cost-to-orbit per kilo
Reading between the lines of the January 2004 Space Initiative: a fresh start, or another 30 years of stasis?
Maybe humans don’t belong in space, however this author feels; but the question will not be fair until we accomplish affordable access to space. If we can do so, many new ventures, from two-hour New York-to-Tokyo flights to orbital solar power stations, become conceivable