Infinity and Beyond update

NASA and its international partners have spent the past eight years assembling a space station... and it's still not done. To be fair, major accidents drastically slowed the pace. But government bureaucracy, design and contract processes slowed our push into space long before Challenger and Columbia were lost.

Meanwhile, the private sector continues to gain on NASA's forty-year head start. In addition to ventures by Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, we now hear this:

Bob Bigelow announced at lunch he will be putting up a three-person space station in late 2009 or early 2010, about fifty percent bigger than an ISS module. He is putting up a destination in hopes that the transportation will come along (and in order to spur the transportation providers). Station will last for several years. Will be executing contracts in 2008 for transportation contracts to Sundancer. Expects between four and eight trips (people and cargo) per year, after six-month shakedown. Then trips will commence whenever transportation becomes available. 2012 will see the launch of another module providing 500 cubic meters of habitable volume. Will support sixteen launches a year for full utilization (again, cargo and people). ... Could represent on the order of a billion a year in revenue. Launch estimates from fifty to a hundred million per flight.

He also announced that he and (Lockheed Martin) have a joint agreement to study what it will take to human rate the Atlas V for commercial passenger transport.

And of course, my favorite line:

About time to take human spaceflight from the exclusive domain of governments. Will be changing that in the next half decade.

People used to quip "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they (fill in the blank)." Government, of course, failed to live up to such high expectations, later failing in "moral equivalents of war" on poverty and drugs. There are limits to what government can accomplish. The Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong to the moon was the perfect metaphor for government action: brute force over efficiency. We dreamed of a golden Space Age in the 1960s but bureaucratic brute force was never going to sustain that dream. Now that market entrepreneurs see the stars within their grasp, that may finally change. NASA will always be remembered for blazing the trail. But where Alan Sheppard may have played the role of Daniel Boone, the real settlers are finally designing their Conestoga wagons. Starward ho!