We'll Go Back To The Moon By

Nasa's Myriad Failures Are In Many Ways The Natural Consequence Of A Catastrophic Combination Of Bureaucracy, Monopoly, And A Calcifying Aversion To The Kind Of Risk Necessary For Innovation.

Space Travel Is The Only Technology That Is More Dangerous And More Expensive Now Than It Was In Its First Year. Fifty Years After Yuri Gagarin, The Space Shuttle Ended Up Being More Dangerous And More Expensive To Fly Than Those First Throwaway Rockets, Even Though Large Portions Of It Were Reusable. It's Absurd.

To Allow Public Access To Orbit, We Would Need Breakthroughs That Would Lower The Cost By A Lot More Than An Order Of Magnitude And Increase Safety By A Factor Of 100 As Compared To Every Launch System Used Since The First Manned Space Flight. I Think Airborne Launch Will Be A Significant Part Of The Safety Solution.

When You Have A Transportation System That The Price Of Propellant Is Essentially Negligible Something Is Very Wrong. If You Look At Any Other Transportation System, A Car, A Motorcycle, A Train, An Oil Tanker, An Airliner, You Name It; About A Quarter To A Third Of The Operating Cost Is Buying The Propellant.

I Have A Hunch The Most Important Reason We're Going To Space Is Not Known Now.