Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

It's official: http://www.spaceportamerica.com The new name for the spaceport in New Mexico has been declared with the homepage. One contractor has already been declared to design this, with an estimated 3500 jobs by the year 2020. Those are probably just the maintenance crews, flight operators, attendants, engineers, etc. to get this thing started. At the moment, the only company (that i know of at least) that will immediately appear is Virgin Galactic. 2010 is the key date. unfortunately, the dollar price for a ticket is $200k with only 5 minutes of weightlessness. so this is definitely a novelty for the social elite. my concern is that despite these numbers, there are two issues remaining: the practical value involved and the high cost for ordinary citizens. in terms of practical value, there really isn't any. practical value would dictate that we could use space flight to arrive at another destination on earth far faster than current means with our 747s, etc. or that we would have trips to the moon, Mars and the space station. these trips do not serve any of these purposes except as a cheap high for people like Paris Hilton (assuming that Paris has any desire to fly). Then the issue of the average person comes into play. Mostly, it's cost but it would be the middle class that would drive the demand and economics up for such a thing and move the pricing downwards. Here, you would need at least two other competitors to make this situation feasible. Still it really isn't useful at this point to the normal person. Personally, i feel that corporations ought to be setting up long term plans of reaching areas like the moon or colonies in space (not on Mars yet). Plans like early phasing of lunar colonization by sending materials and supplies to the moon to begin creating the foundations of infrastructure there. Mining tools and factories for utilizing the raw materials on the moon would need to be flown in parallel as people were slowly prepared to move in that direction. Elements like oxygen and sustenance to me seem to be something that should be brought with the people to avoid spoiling. i'd imagine that some kind of railroad between the Earth and the Moon would be required to usher in new supplies and people until the colonies become self-sustaining. i imagine that a population of at least 1000 would be the bare minimum to get that type of efficiency going. that's the point when the spaceport and commercial space flights would become useful to the average person as now there's a clear destination and purpose defined. until then the demand would probably be low since most people would have no use.