Not Your Father's Space Program

There's little doubt that most of these ventures will crash and burn, metaphorically if not literally (since this really is rocket science). But because the new ferment in commercial space activity means that NASA isn't the only game in town, it doesn't matter if dozens of space companies fail—so long as some succeed. In this regard, it's an environment more like aviation or automobiles in the 1920s, or computers in the 1970s and 1980s, than like space in the "Right Stuff" era of the 1960s.

Politics and command-and-control systems got us to the moon in a decade, but they proved powerless to keep us there. Achieving a space-faring civilization incrementally though profit-making enterprise may take longer, but such an approach doesn't depend on the whims of Presidents, or on right guesses by NASA. It's an approach that takes patience—a quality that has arrived, as it often does, through a combination of time and disappointment.

Not Your Father's Space Program
The Atlantic
June 5, 2008
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806u/space-progam