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Kluger seems to think only governments & NASA need apply....
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/1 ... could-pay/
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/1 ... could-pay/
Vacationing in Space? The Planet Could Pay
Jeffrey Kluger
To hear Richard Branson tell it, your next vacation will be in space. On Friday, Branson, the swashbuckling CEO of Virgin Airlines and the newer Virgin Galactic, cut the ribbon on a 2-mi. (3.2 km) runway in La Cruces, N.M., which will be used in as little as 18 months, he promises, to begin carrying paying tourists into suborbital space. "This is the beginning of the second space age," he said.
Sounds like fun! But there are a few small problems, not the least being that the technology is unproven, even a small malfunction could kill you and in the event that you do come back in one piece, your 15-minute vacation would have cost you a minimum of $200,000. Now, on the very day of Branson's grand unveiling, add one more reason not to get too carried away by the talk of a coming boom in space tourism: according to a new study by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) all the rocketing around could make the atmospheric an even bigger mess than it is today.
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Certainly, these ghosts of pollutants future do not have to come to pass and the AGU acknowledges that just because the rocketeers predict such a robust launch schedule within the decade does not mean it will occur. There's a reason for the idiomatic meaning the term "rocket science" has acquired. It's an extraordinarily tricky technology—and one that exacts an extraordinarily high price for errors. It's hard to sell seats on vehicles that explode, and if the long history of rocketry proves anything it's that somewhere along the way, something always blows up. NASA and the space agencies of other nations have taken decades to master the business of extraterrestrial travel. The commercial sector enters the field at their passengers'—and the planet's—peril.