Hello Raoul -

Euroconsult used to give a detailed breakdown, including lifetimes, pre-books on laundhes and com sats, and capacity. Teal provided something similar, and Department of Commerce, but the DoC numbers were not so reliable.

With the mess going on, reconaissance demand should be high for the next several years. Direct television and radio are also bright spots. So are Mars rovers. Internationally, Russia and China also have their own weather, earth observation, communications, and defense needs.

The big unknown is launch demand for dealing with the impact hazard. A CAPS type system will require a number of launches, and a good number of those should be international.

The big question is whether Cassini will continue to operate long enough to acquire the datasets of the surfaces of Saturn's moons, and how rapidly that data will be analyzed.

In this fiscal climate the Congress will not pay for simple manned exploration which can also be done by unmanned robots. The key is hard data on long term comet impact, and right now Chapman's team simply does not have the intellectual firepower on hand to deliver those numbers in a timely fashion - those skills lay at Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Stanford, and elsewhere...

By the way, have I mentioned to you before that the first emperor of China was killed in an impact?

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