|
Space Future is for everyone who'd like to travel to space for themselves. In fact most people would - but they don't expect to get the chance.
Our goal is that tickets to orbit should be as readily available as airline tickets. For this we need safe, low-cost, passenger-carrying launch vehicles. Space Future considers that developing these is now a realistic target for companies in the aerospace industry - which is painfully short of new business in the post-Cold War era.
Space Future believes that most people who are prepared to save up a few months' salary will get the chance to visit space and stay in an orbital hotel. Another way to space will be to work for one of the new industries that will quickly grow up in space once cheap launch services are developed.
Space Future's focus is opening space to the public, because we consider that, more than anything else, space is a place to go to. It so happens that space is an extremely entertaining place to go to - as everyone who has been there says. Ultimately space is also the future of the human race - or did you think there was somewhere else to go?. What you won't find here is things like astronomy, cosmology, space science and so on; there are already plenty of sites which cover these topics.
The key to reducing the cost of traveling to and from space is scale - that is, for people to go there in large numbers. Fortunately, market research shows that many many people in the industrialized countries would like to take a trip to space - a majority of the population, in fact. So demand could grow to million of customers per year - enough to bring costs down drastically.
Bringing this about is basically a business problem. The cost of developing safe, low-cost, passenger launch vehicles is trivial compared to the scale of business today, but it still needs funding. The "space age" - the real space age, that is, when millions of people live and work in space - will involve a lot of investment in living and working accommodation in space - investment which of course must be paid back. So people who live in space must sell some services and products to the people on Earth (from where the investment came) on a large enough scale to earn sufficient profits to repay the investment (of course communications and broadcasting satellites already earn revenues - but only a few $billions per year for the space industry. By comparison, a single large company today has a turnover of $50 billion per year or more! Satellites also require no people in space so they won't bring about the development of the vehicles we need).
To date the two best ideas are two of the largest businesses on Earth - tourism and electricity - which are already $1 trillion per year and growing fast. So Space Future focuses particularly on the development of these two businesses - tourism in space, and delivering electric power from space to Earth, which will both grow to enormous size as launch costs fall. We also focus on the vehicles, and we support all promising efforts in this direction.
But why should we bother? Why not leave space development to the government space agencies which already have so much experience? Because, unfortunately, the space agencies are going in quite the wrong direction. Taxpayers around the world pay $25 billion in taxes every year for civilian government space activities - but barely 2% of that money is spent on trying to reduce the cost of travel to space! Yet less than one single year of that spending would be enough to develop passenger launch vehicles, and to open space up to us, the general public - who are the people paying all those taxes, year after year!
So Space Future is collecting and publishing the growing body of work being done to bring about popular space travel; it introduces the people and organizations who are working to make the real space age a reality; and it will show that easy access to space is not only possible, but highly desirable, for many reasons - and also imminent, given your support. We discuss the issues, the problems and ideas to solve them, and the optimistic new era that will open as a result of this development - and what you can do to help.
So if you've ever wondered why nothing seemed to come out of all the work that went into the Apollo missions; if you've wondered when anyone 'ordinary' will get into space; or if you just want to have some fun in zero-gravity, Space Future is the site for you. We hope you like it! Let us know what you think.
If this is all new to you or you'd like to know more about the reasons behind Space Future, read about The Philosophy of Space Future.
| 
