You go, Bob!

"Bigelow Aerospace is currently constructing the habitats and hardware that will comprise the world’s first private sector space station"

Hmmmm. Personally, I wish Mr. Bigelow well. But what is the commercial justification for a private sector space station? There does not seem to be much justification for the taxpayer-funded "International" Space Station -- except as a destination for the about-to-be-abandoned Space Shuttle.

The low-hanging fruit in commercial space exploitation has to be Earth-focused comunications & remote sensing satellites. Maybe down the road there coiuld be solar power satellites transmitting power back to Earth. No need for manned intervention. Why is Mr. Bigelow focusing on manned space travel? If you can cast any light on that, Dale, it would be much appreciated.

It basically comes down to the fact that he, like many thousands of us, just wants to GO. It is part of the what liberty is about. He has made his fortune, he wants to do something so he is doing it. He expects to pull in enough business along the way to pay for it. The eco-systems being created by people like him is driving the cost to orbit down already... that is why SpaceX got their contract. There are indeed markets that grow rapidly as that cost falls. Orbital tourism is viable even at $20-30M per flight as the Russians have proven. That price will drop by perhaps half in this decade, if not more. There are research projects both academic and industrial that can utilize space. Space based solar power is far closer than you may think as the technology has simply come on by leaps and bounds in the last decade. The required mass at GEO is falling and the cost per pound is also on the edge of falling rapidly as well; at the same time we have a desire to move away from fossil fuels but have no other serious alternatives for base-load power. The big infrastructure investors are starting to take a serious look at it.

They are not going to stop at low earth orbit. The goals of these entrepreneurs are much bigger than that.

We're going to the Moon Alice, and you can come too!

We're going to the Moon Alice, and you can come too!

And I really really believe that you are making a mistake.

Sod going to the moon, I want my apartment in an O'Neill habitat, one financed by all the financially profitable low grav and vacuum based manufacturing boom which will drag vast numbers of people into orbit. Sod the obsession with gravity wells, they are a hinderance to the real future.

Imagine, your whole town doing a grand tour of the solar system in your retirement.

Alice, you can come along on that as well. Want to sit on a cafe terrace in front of miles wide windows, watching Saturn rotate as the good town USS Solar Voyager establishes orbit?

A lunar colony won't get you that, space based manufacturing colonies will, and I know which I want.

Hmmmm. Personally, I wish Mr. Bigelow well. But what is the commercial justification for a private sector space station?

From what I understand, the customers will mostly be astronauts and scientists from middle-tier countries that can't afford their own station. In other words, most of the customers will be governments.

I think we can be pragmatic on this. From your posts, you are generally supportive of the far more "socialistic" state maintained military industrial complex b/c it is a evil necessity even though corruption and fraud runs deep in the procurement process.

If I remember correctly, you posted about the Eurofighter a while back, even though that project is symbolic of how big a cluster#@#$ any "Socialistic" Pan European procurement can be. It would have axed a long time ago if it was in the private sector , however you accepted it b/c you didn't want Russian Nuclear Bombers penetrating English airspace at will.

Space is the same thing. If you think that private enterprise and the US have the same goals and outlook on space then you flat out wrong. Private enterprise look to space as a way to make money. In contrast, the US needs to look at space as a strategic frontier. I'll be loathe to think that when space inevitably becomes weaponized, that the only presence the US has in space is through privatized multinational assets b/c ideological rigidity.

Thus whatever advances private enterprise does for space, it will not always correlate and may even conflict with the nation's strategic interest. As wary as I am of government, national control of something as important as space is something I will accept out of necessity.

Aki:

Thus whatever advances private enterprise does for space, it will not always correlate and may even conflict with the nation's strategic interest.

"he wants to do something so he is doing it. He expects to pull in enough business along the way to pay for it."

Thanks for the insight, Dale. It is Mr. Bigelow's money, and I wish him well spending it however he chooses.

"As wary as I am of government, national control of something as important as space is something I will accept out of necessity."

Aki, I can accept your premise that some nations (Russia, the US, etc.) will need a space presence for military/national defense purposes (although I second Alisa's question as to why you think that would conflict with the goals of private enterprises). But you've gone over the line in calling for governmental "control" of space. No one should "control" space, least of all untrustworthy terrestrial governments (and don't even try to argue for control by the UN or some other inherently and inevitably corrupt trans-national body). At most, governments can regulate launches from their territory, but that's as far is things can or should go. Space must be free to all.

CountingCats, why are an O'Neill habitat and a moon colony mutually exclusive? As long as they are private enterprises, I would think there would be a market for both. To each his own, as they say.

[Is it appropriate at this point to quote Ralph Kramden: "One of these days Alice, straight to the Moon!"?]

A few quick comments. I am all for O'Neill settlements, but it is going to be a hard slog before we can afford to build them privately. Private settlement of the moon is one of the first steps to that future. I suspect asteroids and Mars are also part of it. We'll build them when we have enough people working permanently in space to create a demand for them, or when nanotechnology makes it so cheap to do so that small groups start building them just because they can.

Second comment. I already beat you to the Ralph Kramden reference. ;-)

"We'll build them when we have enough people working permanently in space to create a demand for them"

Which brings us back to the question: What productive revenue-generating efforts will those people be doing in space? And why will it be people (with their huge logistical tails) rather than machines?

We have all heard about space-based microgravity manufacturing, but that seems to be a solution searching for a problem. Photovoltaics in space? Even if it could compete with a plain old terrestrial nuclear power plant (which it can't), that's a job for a machine.

The fascinating opportunity out there is the rare isotope Helium-3 on the surface of the Moon. He-3 has been proposed as the ideal fuel for fusion power plants, except that it does not exist on Earth. But solar wind has created masses of He-3 on the lunar surface. Supposedly, something like a single shuttle load of He-3 strip-mined on the Moon could provide everyone on Earth with all the energy they need for a year. Now that sounds like a commercial reason for going into space!

Of course, Alice may go to the Moon, but Obama won't.

@Laird, We do need to control space. Think of it like the 100 mile sea boundary the United States imposes around its shore. As much as I believe private enterprise is superior to government bureaucracy in efficiency, I do not want a BlackWater navy defending our trade lanes. Space control practical necessity. Think of it as an extension of US territorial airspace.

@Alisa, I do not have an big enough imagination to think out exactly how private enterprise would operate in space. However, the only historical precedent I can think off remotely related but highly relevant would be the East India Company, which was slowly nationalized because the parliament justifiably deemed that the company's actions and interests ran counter to British national interests.

Alice asked:

Which brings us back to the question: What productive revenue-generating efforts will those people be doing in space?

Zero-gravity porn. What do you think drove the internet?

Once there are a certain number of folk full time in space, the economy will close; most of what is needed will be mined, manufactured and sold in space to residents and most residents will make a living working within the local economy. Water mining, Oxygen production, fuel manufacturing, food production (or synthesis once we start doing it by nanotech), art, electronics, energy production and transfer... it will all happen without Earth in the loop. That is not to say that there will be no exports and imports to Earth, just that they will fall as a percentage to something that would be considered normal for a nation on the surface. The US imports and exports and needs to... but they are not the largest part of the economy. As to information workers, it doesn't matter any more where you are. If you are in a space settlement you can work on a system just as well as someone in India or Ireland works on a US or UK project.

We just have to bootstrap to that point and I think the combination of committed Billionaires and nanotechnology will do it. The government will play a relatively small role.

As to control of space... We are leaving and that means turning our back on Earth based powers to the extent they will allow, and ultimately have sufficient defense to enforce it if they don't.

There are plenty of commercial opportunities in space, and means to get there is approaching cost-effectiveness.

Tourism, mining, manufacturing, porn, science, energy production, and Liberty, are all sufficient reasons for people and machines to get out there.

As for the control methods that traditional Earth-based powers have always exerted, I think space colonization will require more draconian controls than ever we would put up with here on Earth. And by that, I mean private enterprises can and will be the 'Captains of their ships', with commensurate command of life and death of the populations they sustain.

"Socialist Space Ox" ?

Bigelow stands on the shoulders of giants, the hard bit has already been done.

But socialism was nothing to do with it, rocketry was invented to enable mass murder of civilians, the satellite was a military communications tool. Far from being little socialists, it was the abstract market of warmongering that propelled us into space, where does he think his beloved and reliable "Atlas" rocket originated ?

The ISS exists because it wouldn't make good publicity to build an experimental orbital nuclear missile/ABM platform just now, so build one sans missiles just to see if can be done, but don't have it crawling with the general public.

Sorry, Aki, but don't agree. Frankly, I'd rather see Blackwater "defending our trade lanes" (is that a concept which even makes sense in space?) than the Pentagon (or the Kremlin).

And I agree with Dale's last point about "turning our back on Earth based powers to the extent they will allow, and ultimately hav[ing] sufficient defense to enforce it if they don't." There are certain tactical advantages to being at the top of the gravity well. Go read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" if you don't understand this.

[Still waiting for Llamas to throw his usual bucket of cold water on the concept of space habitats!]

But Dale, the new Democrat candidate for Congress in Texas says that the only way to explore space is by unlimited credit money from the Federal government.

And that anyone who opposes unlimited Federal government spending for colonies on Mars is a tool of the British Empire - especially if they support corporations geting involved in space flight.

Of course you are my tool Dale - I wisper orders to you via that implant I put in the back of your head.