And I remember very well when the remote sensing industry was privatized by Reagan, after it was developed by Federal $. I was working in it when it happened.

A lot of science used to be funded by wealthy patrons. The Lick Observatory, which comes to mind because I can see it from my house, was funded by James Lick, who was the richest man in California when he died.

If there is, do it. You can’t expect the government to subsidize you forever.

Damn. I’ve always wanted to say that!

Seriously, I have nothing against free enterprise in space. In fact, I’m all in favor of it, because it seems the government is quickly losing public support for space exploration and I haven’t seen enough yet. We need space like we need billion dollar atom smashers and observatory complexes. But there is no short-term profit to be made in space any more than there is in big astronomy or physics projects here. The payoffs are always indirect and in the far future, and you can’t patent the Higgs Boson or distant quasars.

But we’ve covered all this ground before.
If there were gold and platinum bars neatly stacked on the moon’s surface, we still couldn’t bring them back cheaply enough to make a profit or support a business. Space enterprise is going to have to survive on government contracts or government subsidies for the forseeable future. The government will either be a customer, an investor, or both, until we either find something of great immediate cash value in space to attract private capital, or until some technological breakthrough lowers the costs.

But I have to say I’m really glad to see it happening now, even if I’m watching from the sidelines. Between SpaceX, Bigelow, and others, there is a broad and robust private space industry building, with all the tools needed to put humanity into space in a big way. And they’re going to figure out how to make big money doing it, unlike NASA, which is actually legally prohibited from doing so, and had no real incentive to control costs or be creative in low-cost design tradeoffs.

The Platform document talks about congress funding the development of 3 systems to get astronauts to orbit. I realize that governments incur legitimate expenses, but is this an exercise in free market economics? I mean, if there were commercial reasons for those systems to be developed, would it not happen in the normal course of business?