Mon, Jun 22, 2009
Just a smidgeon over five years ago, ANN was literally on the
edge of history... watching the XPrize-inspired Mike Melvill head
out and then return from the first successful commercial
spaceflight in Burt Rutan's dreamrocket. A lot has happened since
then... and a whole new industry... as well as a public perception
of our future in space, has resulted.
At the National Space Society's 28th annual International Space
Development Conference, NSS and a very motivated group of people
dedicated themselves to an in-depth look into the emerging
privately funded sector of the space industry.
The space industry is undergoing an unprecedented
transformation. The Space Shuttle will be retired in less than two
years, resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs. Although hiring
by the emerging privately funded sector of aerospace may ameliorate
some of this job loss, the suspension of manned spaceflight by our
civil space program for at least five (5) years will nevertheless
create unprecedented losses in experienced personnel who can not be
replaced. This gap in both time and employment will also have a
profoundly negative rippling effect, not just in the space
industry, but also in peripheral and complimentary industries such
as energy, life sciences, travel, education and
telecommunications.
The cost of accomplishing humanity's goal of exploring and
understanding life beyond our atmosphere cannot be realized unless
the space industry diversifies itself. The private sector has a
unique ability to innovate, as it is not subject to many of the
bureaucratic pitfalls that can sometimes hamper government. It can
create economies of scale that make products and activities cheaper
and better. By utilizing procedures and by taking paths that either
do not work or do not apply in a government setting, these
business-minded pathfinders can take the average citizen or company
to places that heretofore were unrealistic.
The bold new generation of aerospace entrepreneurs and private
spaceflight advocates are shifting the paradigm previously thought
to be the exclusive domain of governments, to open up a frontier
previously unattainable to the general public, flying virtually
anyone that wants to go into space.
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