At 04:32 PM 2/8/2003 -0800, you wrote:
I spoke for a while with Buzz Aldrin's son at the World Space Congress last year. He is the head of acquisitions for Boeing. It was an odd conversation. He seemed to really, truly not believe that there is any credible chance that space launch can be made cheap without spending billions of dollars on unresolved research problems.Henry Spencer wrote: > On Sat, 8 Feb 2003, Adrian Tymes wrote: >>Consider, though, that NASA gives a lot of funding to contractors who >>would like to establish all kinds of hurdles to the kind of private >>space we envision, mainly to protect their funding. > > Actually, no. *They don't believe in it.* They do believe in possible > competition for their comsat launches, and *that* they will fight most > vigorously (as witness some of Beal's woes). But on a corporate scale -- > as opposed to occasional mavericks within the structure, who seldom see > much real support from upper management -- they think any sort of cheap > spaceflight is so far off in the future that it's completely beyond their > planning horizon.I'll grant, this is just speculation. We can't know for certain whether they personally believe it or not. But the economics work out that they get a lot more money reliably without cheap spaceflight than with, and history provides any number of examples of large companies trying desparately to protect their industries as they fade into obsolescence.
John Carmack
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