Quote from: OpenMaw on Mar 06, 2012, 01:02:30 AM
Yes. Really. There have been dozens of manned and unmanned pet projects coming into fruition in the last ten years. Corporations are talking about their own private fleets for tourism and business. Talks of private citizens going into space. There are even many people hitting the high side of forty working together to be the first to colonize Mars if and when that mission begins. Their goal is to spend the rest of their lives on Mars, paving the way as proverbial Johnny Appleseed's for the next generation of human beings to live on Mars.
Companies have been talking the same talk since the 90's--if not before. And it has never come to fruition.
Talk is cheap. There is not enough demand for private spaceflight, especially in this economy. Take, for example, Bigelow Aerospace, whom the press was all excited for--
Private spaceflight! Manned space habitats! Ain't gonna happen. The company laid off many of its employees last year, and came out and said there is no chance of their goals being achieved anytime soon, at least not within the next decade.
Let's face it--there is no money in space. When corporations can conceivably find a way to make lots and lots of money in space to pay for the insane amounts of cash it's going to take to build all these ships, life support systems, habitats, terraforming technologies, etc, then
maybe we'll have a future beyond this planet. But for the time being, in the decades to come the only people going up into space are going to be super-rich blowhard tourists and an increasingly dwindling number of scientists.
Of course, you're view is probably more optimistic. I guess we'll just have to see what happens
A more interesting argument is whether we should even start moving out into space in the first place...