Vanessa @ Future of Commercial Space Travel – Predictions, Companies, Technologies

The space programme has paid for itself many times over, even at the outrageous cost NASA produce.

Without it we wouldn't have telecommunication satellites & thus world markets, a world internet or worldwide news pictures. We would still have weather reports that were largely guesswork without satellite pictures which means that hurricanes would still be mass killers. We also wouldn't have these beautiful pictures of Earth in space that the "environmentalist" movement have used so profitably.

The Chinese & Russians both understand this & are opposed to the Luddism so much of our own political class wallows in.

Actually NASA use lots of private contractors, little is state owned.

A more pressing question might be why do countries like China and India launch space missions, prestige more than science. They want to be ahead of the USA, when the USA is not the model modern country it once seemed.

However if they were getting rather closer to the $1,600 million NASA gets annually rather than the one off X-prize of $10 million the effect would be spectacular. I don't think Ariane can be held up as an example of "commercial success" since the budget for ESA is 3 billion Euros (1/4 NASA's & if one also includes the "independent" French & German space programmes it would be 1/2), & there is no prospect of them declaring a dividend. They have yet to achieve even Virgin's level of progress in getting a man into space.

ESA is a bureaucratic monstrosity , even worse than NASA & the money spent on it could be used, as I have described, so very much better.

See, for example http://www.physorg.com/news125598958.html
in which they are threatening to cut the high profile Mars Rover, nominally to save $4 million, out of a budget of $16,000 million but actually as a form of bureaucratic ploy any politician will be familiar with, to extort more money to their budget. This is a sign of how much hardening of the arteries NASA has fallen to.

If America can afford that every year we could easily afford to promise half as much, once, to fund X-Prizes, particularly since they would only be paid if they achieved far more than NASA has in the last 30 years, indeed over a decade it would only match what we currently spend on ESA for little visible achievement.

It is worth mentioning that the Virgin Galactic design owes its existence to Burt Rutan launching Spaceship One, which in turn happened only because private individuals put up an X-Prize of $10 million for the first private launch. If $10 million can accomplish that vastly more is clearly possible.