The Sun? 
Manned orbital weapons platforms are a definite possibility. And manufacture of exotic materials will eventually pay off. Zero-G manufacturing has too much potential to no pay off eventually. Wne we discover that few tons of a metal or composite that can only be made in space can make fuel X% more efficient, or can produce strengths needed for military apps, we’ll start space maufacturing,
And that, my dear Columbus, is why we won’t fund your boondogle of an idea to sail out into the Atlantic…
Seriously though, and not that I’m a fan of gov’t funded space exploration, but haven’t there already been several “aw-shits”, yet we’re still sending people up?
I’ll admit the space tourism is probably a lot more likely in the next few decades then asteroid mining or anything else mentioned in this thread. Still to build an orbital hotel would take a huge initial investment, the ISS was tens of billions of dollars and that was from countries that already had rockets, shuttles, trained astronauts, launching facilities, etc. I’d imagine that investors would need to throw in at least a 100 billion before they could launch their first tourist. I don’t know much about business, but that seems like a lot of capital to raise for an untested business.
Again, not saying it’ll never happen, but that the barriers to making it happen will probably at least push it beyond our lifetimes.
Just because it takes $10 billion for the government to do something doesn’t mean private business can’t do it for $100 million and then turn a profit.
OTOH, it doesn’t mean private business can, either.
But private business is making a go of space tourism. NASA can’t keep its shuttles flying, no matter how much money we throw at them.
You think a private business can build an orbital space station for 100 million dollars??
Keep in mind that a private company will also have to come up with and pay for its own shuttles, rockets, etc. something the US already had when creating the ISS
Anyways I’d imagine most of the ISS was built by private contractors.
I have no idea. I pulled that number out of my ass. I do know that Paul Moller, the guy who has built a fuel efficient, and working flying car, spent only $100 million in R & D, compared to the $1.2 Billion required for the gearbox design on the Bell-Boeing V22 Osprey.
Just sayin’.
How much has Burt Rutan spent on his little almost-but-not-quite-yet space plane?
How much would it have cost the US Gov to do the same thing?
Building a space hotel won’t cost private business more than a fraction of what it would cost the government to build a non-working model of the same thing.
Hmm? Accordiing to this – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_Skycar – it’s still in development.
Good question! How much has he spent?
If it gets to the point where there’s an orbiting “space hotel”, I’ll accept this as meeting the conditions of the OP. But not when the tourists merely ride a rocket up to 60 miles above the earth and back down.
Not that I wouldn’t cheerfully commit murder* for the chance to take such a ride. But “space flights” that only last seven minutes hardly count as a ‘permanent presence’.
*Mods: This is what we call a figure of speech.
:dubious: Who knows? It is extremely foolish to assume the private sector can do any particular thing more efficiently than government can. The economic pressures/restrictions/limitations on the two are different, but the basic laws of economics apply equally to both.
Oh now that’s a bunch of baloney and you know it. 
Our whole system is based on private business doing things better and cheaper than the government. Sometimes the US postal service works just fine, sometimes UPS or Fedex are exactly what you need.
Sometimes we need government to step in and tell private business to stop polluting the environment. That doesn’t mean the government can chop down 1000 trees and turn them into furniture you’d actually want to buy.
Good point. Most of what is now proposed or contemplated falls well short of the OP’s standard.
As others have noted, the big problem is the lack of a compelling mission. In the absence of anything obvious, we’re reduced to speculating about mining stuff on the moon. If it were possible to build an orbiting hotel for $100 million (and to get people there and back at reasonable cost and safely) that would probably suffice. But given that big hotels in Las Vegas cost around that much, don’t hold your breath.
Another problem is that the number of jobs for which a human is needed in space may be declining. Given what we’ve seen on Mars, it’s not clear that mining Helium-3 on the moon necessarily implies a permanent human presence there (or indeed requires any human space travel).
While I agree with your general claim that private industry is capable of being much more efficient than the government, Paul Moller’s flying car is a horrible example. For one thing, it doesn’t fly. After 30 years of development, he’s managed to get one into a tethered hover, which is a reasonable accomplishment but nothing extraordinary. Avro in Canada made a flying ‘car’ with a ducted fan decades ago, and probably spent less than Moller.
In addition, everyone I know who knows anything about airplanes agrees that Moller’s claims of fuel efficiency and range are total nonsense. Wankel rotaries are not known for their fuel efficiency, and even if they were, his numbers are totally unreasonable.
Finally, his Skycar will never be approved for flight due to all kinds of problems, and as a guess I’d say that he’s only 1/4 of the way through all of the engineering issues after spending a third of his life on the project.
20 million bucks. Not chump change. And it’s just a suborbital ballistic rocket. That’s a FAR cry from orbital flight, or from an orbiting space hotel.
Let’s not go to extremes. Bigelow Aerospace is putting up 50 million bucks as a prize to anyone who can simply build a vehicle that can dock with their inflatable space habitat. Bigelow itself believes that this will trigger a 500 million to a billion dollars of investment. And that’s just for the ship to get up to the hotel and back.
Bigelow expects to spend 500 million dollars over the next 15 years to develop a space ‘hotel’ and infrastructure. And this ‘hotel’ will be little more than a few inflatable habitats that a handful of people at a time can stay in for a couple of days.
Space is expensive. Government is bloated and inefficient, but not so much so that private industry can do the same thing for pennies on the dollar.
No. It. Doesn’t. :mad:
We’ve established that private citizens want to go to space, can afford to go to space, and are going to space. How long before someone builds a frikin’ hotel? Within our lifetimes? 50 years or so?
Well I’m just going off his website and I freely and enthusiastically admit putting something on your website doesn’t mean diddley. Still, it appears that before he starts selling these things to private individuals, he’s quite possibly going to be selling his flying cars to the military. If the military wants them, how long will it be before the Schwarzeneggers of the world want one of their own, and then the things become trendy?
I think yes.
Chang’e I is an expression of Chinese aspirations to be a superpower.
I wonder if the lunar graphing detailed in that story is intended to identify a sealed lava tube as mentioned above?
Don’t take ANYTHING you read on Moller’s cite seriously. He’s been making extravagent claims about his Skycar for decades. I’m guessing the military’s interest is along the lines of, ‘Okay, you get it flying and certified, and then we’ll talk’.
Seriously, the thing is snake-oil. There’s real engineering in it, and Moller’s a real engineer (and I believe he means well), but his claims fall into the ‘eccentric inventor’ category, and that’s being charitable.
I guess it depends on your opinion of what’s now planned or contemplated. In reviewing this thread, I see several mentions of space tourism that embrace short flights - some of those will probably happen before too long.
But to meet the OP’s standard of 50 people permanently in space will certainly take a lot longer. You post #13 mentions a space hotel “within 20 years or so”. As others have noted, the “or so” has in the past often proved to be rather a long time.
The extra cost of keeping tourists safely in space for days rather than minutes will likely be huge, which tends to imply a considerable period of short jaunts before we get 50 people up there permanently.