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Old April 12th 07, 08:31 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Joe Strout
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Posts: 972
Default Bigelow Aerospace business plans

http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3722

Pretty neat. $15M for a 4-week stay on orbit; that's quite an
improvement over $20M for a 5-day stay. And $88M/year to lease your own
300-m^3 space station module? That's a real bargain.

In such an environment, I can imagine a lot of smaller countries
developing an astronaut corps that way. NASA will look a bit foolish
when there are twice as many Japanese astronauts on orbit as Americans,
and they're paying a fraction of what we pay for that capability.

The cool thing about this is, even if the schedule slips and the prices
creep a bit (as they are almost certain to do), it's still a starting
point much lower than anything governments have done. And once there
are regular paying customers, prices will continue to come down and
performance will go up, both in the launchers and in the on-orbit
facilities. Bigelow won't long be the only player in that space. And
besides direct competitors, there will be lots of room for support
companies providing on-orbit fuel, power, tug service, and much more.
Real space infrastructure at last!