The sky starts at your feetThis chapter offers a lot more to comment on. I am not familiar with the Kahn reference (my memory is that Kahn was somewhat keen on the long term possibilities of space exploitation) but its interesting how the author tries to frame the discussion so that even the people who would logically be counted in the anti-group should feel compelled to agitate for space exploitation.
There's the bit I quoted earlier, where Americans yearn for a frontier like the days of the Old West without the associated genocide of the days of Old West. There's also the usual bit where if the term had percolated out into the right wing public mind by then the author would bitch about "political correctness" with respect to settlements versus colonies. Happy, both terms are now considered offensive.
If you can find the fatal flaw you could bring this nonsense to a stop.
As it turns out, the fatal flaw did that all by itself. I think it had to do with it being a flaw that was fatal. The fatal flaw is that costs never came down and linked to it was that the expected reasons to invest in cheaper rockets turned out to be phantasms, at least in the three decades since this book came out.
once we get past the brief airplane-like period of the space shuttle.
Who knew? But I guess in the time scale of, say, the spread of particular domesticated animals, the generation and a half lifespan of the shuttle was pretty short and it doesn't look like it led to a Shuttle 2.0.
The author (SB - Brand himself?) spends a lot of time declaring inevitable victory. Well, when he was editing the book the US had just gone from an embarrassing series of launch-pad explosions to men on the Moon in about a decade and the mass to orbit per year had only just peaked a few years before. It's like the guys at the end of the 1950s who looked at the progress in nuclear explosives between 1940 and 1955 and who quite reasonably expected similar progress in the future (in particular fissionless nuclear explosives).