shakran

I think the answer is both.

Ok, so we want to start space tourism. It'll start off with rides into space, but travellers will get tired of that. They'll want the space hotel, so we'll get that. Then they'll want to go to the moon so businesses will figure out how to do that (and they'll do it safer than NASA ever did it because now we're risking customers' lives and their families can sue). Well now that we have tourism on the moon we need to support the tourism industry, so we'll start a freight industry going to the moon to bring food, toiletries, and lemon-soaked paper napkins (10 points to whoever gets that reference) to the moon hotel.

One business might be there to begin with, but startup consumer industries tend to be a bit like reality shows. Once one company is successful in the new business, others get on board pretty quick. Happened with computers, cell phones, cars, and literally every other product we buy and service we pay for. It'll happen with space tourism.

That will lead to lower costs to get people into space. Eventually it'll be pretty cheap to launch 1,000 pounds worth of people into space, and that means it'll be cheap to launch 1,000 pounds of anything into space. That will lead to a huge increase in exploration of space, colonization of the moon and mars, mining of asteroids, etc etc etc.

throughout history it's always been the businesses and private entities that have sparked real advances.

Columbus found America because he wanted to find a faster route to get cargo from India to Europe.

Henry Ford invented the assembly line because he wanted to sell more cars to more people.

the Wright Brothers invented the airplane because they thought humans should fly. In only 60 or so years, we went from a plane which barely flew faster than people can run, and only flew for 12 seconds, to having planes that can cross the United States in less than an hour (SR-71). In the 101 years since the Wright Flyer flew we've developed planes that can carry hundreds of people at nearly the speed of sound for thousands of miles. We've even developed a supersonic passenger plane, and we developed it so long ago that it's now retired after decades of service. In other words, businesses saw the money earning potential of airplanes and developed them at an astonishingly fast pace - so fast that the first jet appeared about 40 years after the first airplane appeared. And most of the history of aviation advances has been done without powerful computer-aided design. Imagine how fast we can develop space travel now.

And now Rutan is working with SpaceshipOne because he wants to put people in space.


The government sponsored program (NASA) has been doing a frankly lousy-assed job of it. We went to the moon a few times to show the Russians we could do it. We only sent a geologist on the LAST mission (WTF did we go to the moon for then!) and we've never been back since despite the huge promise it holds for us. We design the space shuttle as a proof-of-concept vehicle - it was a test bed to see if a reusable space vehicle was possible, and was supposed to be replaced with the real thing once we found out it worked. It never was and we've now lost two shuttles because 1) the shuttle was never meant to be a production vehicle and 2) NASA is farking stupid when it comes to taking safety risks.

It's only when you get private industry involved that you get faster, cheaper, and safer results. If corporations had been involved in 1981 when the shuttle debuted, we'd already have a taxi service to and from the moon. We'd have people living on the moon. We'd probably either already be on, or be seriously moving toward being on, mars, and we'd be doing it for chump change compared to what one shuttle flight that puts a max of 6 people in orbit for an absolute max of one month costs us now.