Googaw’s point, I think, is that space already is open. We’re using it right now. What we’re not doing is living up there. Similarly, we’re not living in Antarctica, the bottom of the ocean, or the Mojave desert (wait, nevermind, some are)… Space is a ridiculously difficult environment to live in; it puts the harshest environments here on the surface to shame, minus perhaps the interiors of active volcanoes and the bottom of the Mariana trench.

We tend to congregate in places conducive to human life, and we generally only use extreme environments in ways that enhance that life. For instance, in mountainous areas, most homes are built in the valleys, and we locate transmitters and radar on the mountain peaks. It’s certainly fun to go to Sunrise Peak overlooking Las Vegas, but quite conspicuously, nobody lives there.

That is not to say that there can’t be an advantage to manned space flight. There are some very productive things I’d like to do in space that are not very conducive to automation with a 10 minute communication lag. Getting into space in creatively cheap ways could very well stimulate demand that we haven’t imagined yet.

Settling low-earth orbit is kind of like settling Sunrise Peak. Unless you’ve got some real competitive advantage in LEO that justifies the cost of sustaining life, besides the fact that you like it there, you can’t sustain it. And the only way it will become cost competitive is with a huge breakthrough in access to orbit, which quite frankly will not happen by optimizing rockets. That doesn’t mean using other space-based resources can’t be economical within a much shorter timeframe. It just means that living there will be like living on an off-shore oil rig, rather than being a nice vacation. Like an outpost.

I presented it above:

Real commerce makes far more use of higher orbits and especially of geosynchronous orbit (GEO) because real commerce is about serving real needs on earth. Locating so that your spacecraft or at least part of your constellation stays over your customer’s location is quite important for most real space commerce (e.g. comsats, GPS). Some real commerce needs to conveniently reach any spot above earth and for that polar orbit is the orbit of choice.

Ought we to take away all funding for all spaceflight? Wait dressed in white robes on rooftops for the singularity? What?

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in them. Microgravity experiments have been going on for decades on Skylab, Salyut, Shuttle, Mir, etc.. They have hardly had to wait for the ISS. The problem is not the age, the problem is the fact that these ideas have been tried repeatedly and quite often, and have failed the test of economics every time and by extremely wide margins. Unless your goal was to get fat NASA contracts, in which case they have often been remarkably successful. Since HSF fandom is religious dogma, not real science or real commerce, it doesn’t matter how many times these NASA economic fantasies fail, or by how ludicrously large margins they fail, the faithful remain faithful and remain supportive of NASA throwing billions of dollars into the same rituals that have failed more often than lemmings have died jumping over cliffs.

Long-term goals _NEVER_ happen if you don’t invest in them. Using the fact that they are “long-term” goals as a reason not to invest in them is foolishness. Logic like that is much of the reason we are in the economic malaise we have now.

The intense hype regarding these hypothetical markets for microgravity science and orbital tourism has been around for decades. This hype has been a very lucrative source of NASA contracts but of almost zero real commercial revenues. For example over a hundred billion dollars was spent on the ISS based in large part on the supposed rich prospects of microgravity science, and where is that “market” now? Sorry, but recycling long-obsolete ideas as new may fly among the astronaut fan faithful, but it doesn’t fly in real commerce.

“Flights of imagination to future space settlements are fine as far as science fiction goes, but they tell us very little about what are the best things to do in the meantime.”

Investing in yesteryears business model isn’t going to tell you the best things to do..

Real commerce (beyond telecommunications, navigation)

“I do believe you are missing the point. The telecomm, nav, etc. is the real commerce ”

Actually were not, you are. You are doing the business equivalent of the military error of fighting the last war. Telecom and navigation are TODAYs space commerce. So what? Business growth and innovation is about figuring out what commerce will be in 10 years and investing today for that business environment. You, on the other hand, are arguing for investing for last decades space market.