Baby Steps

A first step towards commercial de-regulation of orbital space. It's halting, to be sure. There are petty bureaucrats within both NASA and the FAA maneuvering for advantage and sniping at potential rivals, but at least it's a tentative move in the right direction.

Nothing this big and important will come without bureaucracy on the front end, but the market forces it enables will eventually make the bureaucrats irrelevant. Columbus only had to grovel and beg the first time; once it became apparent a New World lay open for exploitation, the race was on.

The stars, so to speak, are finally aligning. The long hiatus from space exploration which has comprised most of my lifetime may finally be approaching an end. Now that the space buses are rotting away in well-deserved obscurity, NASA has little on which to hang their overpriced hats. Somebody has to take food pellets up to the International Space Habitrail, after all, and NASA's got no ships. Once industry starts building their own stations, the Habitrail will become yet another pile of useless government junk.

Here's hoping we'll see a commercial space race in my lifetime. If not, however, I am content knowing that it is an inevitability which can only be deflected, not stopped.