Private Spacecraft Prospects

mwallis writes "Space.com has an article on the recent Space Access conference in Scottsdale a few weeks ago. The article talks about the (slowly) emerging commercial space transportation industry with interviews and quotes from Space Access Society's Henry Vanderbilt, XCOR's Aleta Jackson, Armadillo's John Carmack and many others."

Comments

Not impressed.

[moogla]

Why would you want to pay to sit in low-earth orbit for (any) period of time?

We need:

1) High-altitude high-speed space/planes to make the 3 hour trip from Chicago O'hare to Tokyo

or

2) Some sort of destination for the space trip, ala the moon.

If it's weightlessness you want, I'm sure you can buy a vomit comit for much less than funding your own rocket program.

Now, if your enterprise is purely geared towards privatizing small-scale space work, and gaining a foothold in that area, then I have to applaud that. If we're going to have an inter-sol-system trucking company we've gotta have pioneers. ^_^

A whole new battlefield

[TopShelf]

How long before cheaper access to space leads to various parties messing around with satellites that are currently in orbit? If some baddie with vast financial resources (two immediately come to mind) had the gumption, he could probably wreak havoc with commercial and military communications networks.