[Venturer]

Just a question, dumb one I know.

I mean I realise that satelites for communications, and weather satelites can be sent up commercially, but what does the private sector care abour putting people in space. Where is the profit. If there is no profit the private sector is not going to go there.

Whjy would the private sector want to put a man in the space station. IMO we just gave the space station to the Russians.Perhaps before long to the Chinese. It’s a great place to build a space weapon.If Russia refuses to grant us passage there would be nothing we could do about it.

[Spktyr]

Space tourism and research are two things that can and do generate money (the Russians keep their programs going with the occasional space tourist).

Also, there are plans to put hotels in orbit - and they won’t take any decades to build, either.

[Spktyr]

On top of that, there’s other commercial opportunities in space, plus a suborbital transport network could seriously cut travel times in half.

The reason the space private sector is so underdeveloped right now is because NASA spent the last 20+ years systematically destroying anything that looked like it could threaten the monopoly on manned flight they had with the shuttle. In fact, they went ahead and destroyed any in-house program that didn’t have the space vehicle returning to Earth with wings. Stupid, stupid, stupid. DC-X proved you don’t need wings to land.

[Flag_This]

"I mean I realise that satelites for communications, and weather satelites can be sent up commercially, but what does the private sector care abour putting people in space. Where is the profit?"

I can think of $5 trillion reasons...

"Metalliferous asteroids as potential sources of precious metals"

"Successful recovery of 400,000 tons or more of precious metals contained in the smallest and least rich of these metallic NEAs could yield products worth $5.1 trillion (US) at recent market prices."