With the recent unveiling of Scaled Composite’s SpaceShipOne, entrepreneurial efforts to crack the commercial human spaceflight market are moving ahead full-throttle. Along with that project, many private rocketeers are eager to break the technical and bureaucratic bonds that hold back low-cost, reusable space transportation.
“There’s a dawning realization that has come over a lot of us. It’s up to us if things are going to get done at all and anytime soon,” said Henry Vanderbilt, Executive Director of the Space Access Society. Vanderbilt was speaking at the Space Access ’03 conference, held here April 24-26.
In large measure, those attending Space Access ’03 have given up on NASA. The agency has chained itself to flying for decades more an ultra-expensive and cumbersome B-52 of space – the space shuttle. NASA is also concentrating on an Orbital Space Plane taxi service to the International Space Station.
