A continuing series for the gravitationally impaired.
To really make Space a going concern you need about 10,000 people in space to give you the depth of expertise, to support the industrial base, give economies of scale for transportation, and to provide a market for products and services. Current cost to get into space is $20 mil, so, $20,000,000.00 X 10,000 =$200,000,000,000.00. And the infrastructure to support them costs about 1000 times that, so $200,000,000,000,000.00. That’s the reality. And no, I do not have that in the bank.
To put it another way, let’s take six, one to three day vacations in western national parks for two people. We’ll need a minivan (used), fuel, food, cameras, park admission, camping gear, etc., let’s say $24,000.00. Doable, actually it’s marketable. Six on to three day trips to the Moon in 1960’s dollars is $24,000,000,000.00, the final tally for Apollo. That’s about a million to one ratio of what it takes to do something on Earth. And it says nothing about staying.
Let me put this plainly, Consider a brick wall 1000 feet high, The suborbital tourist operators are smashing their heads against that wall at about the six foot level, and NASA with federal subsidy is hitting it at about the twelve foot level pretty much head-on too. NASA has been lying about opening the space frontier for about 50 years because they know how huge the problem really is, and anybody who thinks suborbital tourism is going to do the deed is delusional also. Bottom line it’s going to take radically different thinking to get over the top, doing it the same way but with more money, or with a 50% savings in launch costs, or going to Mars, is NOT going to change the reality. But it can be done.