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I friggin' LOVE this guy.

I think his 3yrs thing might be a bit ambitious for anything other than a parbolic sub-orbit up&down flight.

Though with BUSH saying he wants a moon-base operational by 2020 (as a stepping stone to Mars), I think an actual orbital trip could be consumer bound in 5-8.

Though with BUSH saying he wants a moon-base operational by 2020 (as a stepping stone to Mars), I think an actual orbital trip could be consumer bound in 5-8.

I would be very surprised if the government/NASA did pull off a mission to the moon by 2020. With the leaps in technology in areas of computing, materials, and propulsion alone since we last set foot on the moon, the government should have already been on the moon and signing up colonists.

I think President Bush is just trying to please some government contractors and those of us who remember being amazed by the Apollo missions, and he's throwing a bone out there. The project will undergo mission creep, just as the Space Shuttle did, and the democrats and Republicans will end up either scaling it back in favor of other wastes of money, I mean government programs, or they'll make it so expensive that our kids will be paying for it for decades.

You said the most important word - consumer. I think the world of Burt Rutan (and his brother who did some amazing things of his own as well as writing one helluva book about his missions over Vietnam), but I'm glad to say it's not just him, Paul Allen, and Richard Branson. Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), along with many others are going full-bore, and they are putting their money where their mouth is. Bezos is in the process of building a spaceport in West Texas, others are continuing their design/testing work.

It's hard to comprehend that we are on the edge of something that could be bigger than anything this nation has done. My greatgrandkids could very well take space travel for granted.