The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight. Th

The problem, and it's one that won't go away by the magic of capitalism, is that no one wants to put real money into space just for the sake of spaceflight. There's only a few things that people are willing to pay $1000 a pound to send into space. One of them is communications relays. Another is cameras. The third is themselves. I'm hopeful that space tourism will be the killer app for human spaceflight, because the current model of "let's fucken just send people up to see what happens" has pretty much reached its endpoint: we know what happens.