http://www.space.com/businesst ... ingalactic_spaceport.html

Richard Branson is the new Howard Hughes, I guess.

Will be pretty awesome if they pull it off, even for a little bit. The world needs to get excited about space again.

It'll be a good start, but not really practical for most people until the cost of a seat plummets. The experience of suborbital flight will sell, but in the distant future I can see LEO hotels cropping up too.

I bet Dettol are building another factory to cover Virgin Galactic's huge disinfectant requirements.

What about a Caviar manufacturer, for all those richarse needs!

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

The world needs to get excited about space again.

The world needs single-use spaceships that are big and cheap - with capacity for hundreds if not thousands. This message sponsored by the Church Of Euthanasia's One-Way-Plus Travel Programme. Book today!

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I bet Dettol are building another factory to cover Virgin Galactic's huge disinfectant requirements.

I had never heard of Dettol until I saw it at some pal's bathroom and even then I had no idea what it was - ever since I've been hearing or reading mentions of it or noticing it more and more around. Just the other day this guy with massively dark circles under his eyes lurched over to me at a traffic light and moaned 'deeeetooolll' as I was pulling away. Spooky stuff.

Talking of Virgin Galactic, I hope they find Steve Fossett. He's one of those people that reaffirms my faith that humans can achieve great things etc. Without people like him, Rutan and Branson, we'd be stuck relying on NASA.

The problem is that NASA hold back many brilliant ideas because it is under funded. The future of space is commercial, then governments can piggy back onto that for exploration missions. Just as long as they restrict things like advertising, waste and mining.

I'm also wondering why NASA didn't stuck at one project, but instead cancelede and begun from scratch many times.
First the X-33, which i found absolutely staggering.
Now they're doing this Apollo-ish thing which should be used to bring stuff and personnel to the moon, and a reusable orbiter, basically Shuttle2, which can be mounted on one of those apollo-ish rockets (don't know the name - sorry) instead of using booster rockets like now.

What annoys me about NASA is that publically, they're all "colonise the moon this, explore Mars that" when in reality they're about to phase out the Shuttle (which is the start of the future of exploration imo) to go back to Apollo tech- seems a step backwards like scrapping the Concorde and the Sonic Cruiser were- in the faint hope of reaching the Moon within 20 years.

They really haven't been pushing exploration forward since the early 80's.

Space exploration will only get going once they establish a base on the moon that is capable of manufacturing and launching space craft. The technology is there to do that today, but so much of their funding is decided by PR, and risky missions are not something they are prepared to do. I think the problem is that people no longer accept death, they are too comfortable in their safe little communities. Why do you think so much gets done during big wars, people pull their heads out of their asses because they might not be around tomorrow.

Imho, the whole going into space thing is just too freakin' expensive at the moment. I mean, let's sort this planet first before ruining the other ones

Use that money to create better energy sources or better wealth for all people instead of building 4x4m huts in the moon

Quote from TiJay :

They really haven't been pushing exploration forward since the early 80's.

They've been doing plenty of unmanned prep for a manned Mars flight which is already in full swing as a real project.