Reply to Joseph A. Dellinger (I think this is from you, the message
was not signed and I looked in the header. Forgive me John if it was not
you.)
>>I had thought that the long unbroken span of MIR crews in the
1990's marked the beginning, but it was not --- it got interrupted last
year. When the first crew goes up to take residence in the space station,
will _that_ finally mark the beginning?<<
Permanent human occupation off the earth will not happen until it is
commercially viable. In other words, it won't happen until someone can
make money by doing so.
In my ever so humble opinion, the Shuttle program set commercial
space travel back by 40 years. The early projections of high frequency at
very low cost caused every potential commercial operation (-I hate giving
credit to the French<G>-except Ariane) to abandon the idea.
Scientific use of space was also set back because the cost was NEVER
low and the frequency went to zero after the shuttle crash. Of course, the
frequency never got close the the original projection of 100 to 200
launches per year by the early '90s.
When the governments get out of the way of the launch business, free
enterprise will jump in to fill the needs. Eventually, access to space
will become (relatively speaking) as cheap and available as an airline
ticket. Being 45 now, I have doubts that I will live long enough to buy my
ticket.
Mike Wendt. N13.5 E144.8
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 31 2000 - 13:49:00 PST