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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Charles Krauthammer has an editorial in the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] (alt link [columbian.com]) singing the praises of recent reusable rocket milestones achieved by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos:

On Dec. 21, Elon Musk's SpaceX, after launching 11 satellites into orbit, returned its 15-story booster rocket, upright and intact [washingtonpost.com], to a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. That's a $60 million mountain of machinery — recovered. (The traditional booster rocket either burns up or disappears into some ocean.)

The reusable rocket has arrived. Arguably, it arrived a month earlier when Blue Origin, a privately owned outfit created by Jeffrey P. Bezos (Amazon chief executive and owner of this newspaper) launched and landed [washingtonpost.com] its own booster rocket, albeit for a suborbital flight. But whether you attribute priority to Musk or Bezos, the two events together mark the inauguration of a new era in spaceflight.

Musk predicts [spacex.com] that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold. This depends, of course, on whether the wear and tear and stresses of the launch make the refurbishing prohibitively expensive. Assuming it's not, and assuming Musk is even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.

Which both democratizes and commercializes it. Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government — presidents, Congress, NASA bureaucracies. Its future will now be driven far more by a competitive marketplace with its multiplicity of independent actors, including deeply motivated, financially savvy and visionary entrepreneurs.

[...] Today future directions are being set by private companies with growing technical experience and competing visions. Musk is fixated on colonizing Mars [washingtonpost.com], Bezos on seeing millions of people living and working in space [seattletimes.com], and Richard Branson on space tourism by way of Virgin Galactic (he has already sold 700 tickets to ride at $250,000 each). And Moon Express, another private enterprise, is not even interested in hurling about clumsy, air-breathing humans. It is bent on robotic mining expeditions to the moon [cnbc.com]. My personal preference is a permanent manned moon base, which would likely already exist had our politicians not decided to abandon the moon in the early 1970s.

From a separate editorial [pal-item.com]:

Already, the global space economy has reached about $330 billion. It's growing rapidly, according to the Space Foundation, and most of it — about 75 percent — is from commercial activity. Elon Musk's SpaceX proved it's possible to expand that market with reusable rockets.

Original Submission