'Consider this:
'Just five years ago, tourist Dennis Tito's ride to the International Space Station cost him $20 million.
'In 2008, a private firm -- Virgin Galactic -- will take you to space for just $200,000.
'In seven years, that's a 99 percent drop.
'Scott says prices should keep dropping faster than a capsule coming back from orbit.
' "Ten years from now, that may be another order of magnitude lower, 20 years, may be two orders of magnitude lower than that. So the price -- just like the price of airlines -- is going to continue to come down," he said.(link)(via)
Of course he's forgetting that NASA used to be able to launch cargo at $8000/pound. With the space shuttle it's at $16,000/pound now. So, if you take that logic he's using... You see the picture I'm drawing. Also many made the mistake of assuming that since it took 60 years to get to the moon from a crackety old wooden piece of crap flying machine that flew barely a foot off the ground, that over the next 60 years we would be... well... a lot farther ahead than we are now.
'He pointed to one company that's already drawing up plans for an inflatable space station where tourists could spend a few hours or a few days floating weightless.
'Scott sees folks like you and me flying in space -- as a moment as significant as the first passengers paying the Wright Brothers for a ride a hundred years ago.
Assuming that "one company" is Bigelow and his inflatable habitats I think it's fair to say he's overstating the case. I hope Bigelow manages to pull it off and we have a space hotel in space in the very near future, but there are just too many assumptions that this guy is making. Any one of these "forecasts" he's making could be wrong, and in which case everything else becomes a crap shoot.
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