I see nothing there that I wasn't hearing years ago at the L-5 Society conferences. It was all about petitions to Congress, and somehow convincing NASA to put the rest of humanity into space.

I stood up then--almost thirty years ago--and told them that the government space program was the problem, not the solution. You would have thought I was the one from outer space.

From the article linked:

For many smart people, both inside and outside the US government, our arguments for CRATS may be common sense. The primary issue for many of them is not whether CRATS is a good thing—they agree it is—but the fact that we have now tried several times, that we have failed just as many times, and achieving CRATS is not an easy thing to do. In fact, when they hear arguments for CRATS, they almost automatically hear another call for huge multi-billion-dollar programs, which will probably fail again.

Any new initiative to achieve CRATS must address the repeated national failures (Shuttle, NASP, X-33, X-34) to achieve CRATS. Instead of trying the same old thing over again, and expecting different results, a new initiative would address the core reasons for the failure, and provide some ideas on a new approach.

What they can't see, and what those space advocates thirty years ago couldn't see, is that it isn't a matter of the same entities doing it differently. The problem is inherent in the very core of government space programs, how they're organized, how they're funded, and the actual motivations behind them.

I've worked off and on since then on private enterprise solutions, a model where the objective is the result, not the process. Some attempts got further than others, but nothing ever took off. We spent years trying to find investors who could see the potential. Some small investors came in long enough to get started, but none of them had pockets deep enough to go to the finish.

The last big plunge was Rotary Rocket Company. We had the rollout down in Mojave, and big money people came from all over to see it. And in the age of electronics and software, there were a lot more big money people than there were when I started in this business.

But the timing stunk. It was the height of the dot.com boom, and who would want to put money into something with a payout almost ten years into the future when they could make millions with that money next week? The company eventually folded (well, so did the dot.com boom).

Now the private space industry seems to have found the secret combination--big money people who want to do it themselves. Modern billionaires seem to be a different breed than the billionaires of the 1970s and early 1980s: A lot more geeks, not so many MBAs. They founded their own companies, and since the deep pockets are their own, they have been able to more easily weather the storms that any space development project runs into.

I'm not a major part of any of the big players this time around, but I'm encouraged to see how close we are to some real progress in private space systems. I have a small amount of pride that the companies I helped found may have seeded some new thinking out there. Rutan started thinking hard about space working with us. Maybe so did Branson, after we gave him the Roton tourism pitch. I have a painting on my wall of the Roton in Virgin Galactic livery.

Those pushing CRATS need to get away from the old paradigms, or they're never going to get anywhere.