Last night, I've come across this comment on a smh blog: To see the "little guy" [...] do for millions what NASA does for billions was fantastic!
Yeah. Wonderful.
It really does give that impression, doesn't it?
Trouble is, Virgin Galactic and NASA are doing very very different things: with current technology, suborbital lobs are a lot easier than orbital flights and moon missions. Nothing the X Prize or Virgin Galactic have developed so far has changed that, and nothing in the future is likely to.
You see, we already have the technology for suborbital lobs, it's just a question of using it - mostly, of creating a market for it, purely a PR and advertising job.
For true space flight, the technology is on the edge of feasibility, today as 50 years ago. You can do it - just - with great expense. There's been plenty of research into improving the situation, but it's a long-term research project - significantly more efficient engines don't just come off the production line, and sometimes (as here) you can just stare at it for fifty years and end up with nothing usable (or, at least, nothing usable for the original problem - they've come up with lots of other things by-the-way).
Long-term research projects of uncertain outcome are of no interest to private companies, so they will not invest in them.
Meanwhile, the great achievements of 20th-century space travel are being trivialised by self-serving, misleading press suggesting that flying Virgin Galactic is comparable to "be[ing] Buzz Aldrin".
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