On Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:46:11 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Wayne Throop) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

: Joe Strout
: - Flight rate. So far, about 500 humans have ever been in space.
: Virgin Galactic plans to fly about 500 passengers per year. Manned
: space launches currently happen at a rate of about half a dozen
: (launches, not people) per year; Virgin will be flying more than once
: per week. And of course, VG will not be the only game in town; Space
: Adventures also seems pretty credible to me in their plans for
: suborbital tourism. So in a few years, we're looking at a flight rate
: orders of magnitude higher than what we have now. Even if this is
: suborbital rather than orbital, this will result in a much faster
: feedback & revision cycle, and so faster progress.

My problelm with this one is that you can revise and improve suborbital
flight all you want, and you're still no farther along than the X15 was,
in terms of basic capability. Is there some reason to think this will
spill over to orbtial capability?

Yes.

Suborbital will gradually increase its speed and altitude to the point
that it becomes orbital, in a more natural progression than occurred
with the unnatural jump to Apollo, which was a cost-is-no-object
response to the needs of the Cold War.

: - Once the cold war rivalry as justification for space development
: evaporated, the space community seized on science as its raison
: d'etre. This was a mistake; space science is almost entirely pure
: research, and there isn't much money in that (in the short term
: anyway);

My problem with this is that there has been lots of money to be made for
less costly launch capability for some time. Slots for comm satellites,
weather satellites, mapping satellites, and on and on.

Not really. For the most part, launch costs were not significant
drivers of those projects to demand lower ones.

Projects like
Iridium might have been profitable if the costs of keeping the satellites
up and supplying more were less.

Even they weren't willing to spend enough money on the necessary
development to lower the cost of launch, and they didn't provide
enough market to do so. So far, there's only one clear market that
could, and doesn't require ancillary technology development--people
who want to go and are willing to pay their own money for the
opportunity.