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The concept of Spaceport Malaysia was pioneered by Prof. Patrick Collins and Space Future in 2002, and both Prof. Patrick Collins and Space Future remains as a stakeholder in the project.
About Space Future
Spacefuture.com, bringing this about is basically a business problem. The cost of developing safe, low-cost, passenger launch vehicles is trivial compared to the scale of business today, but it still needs funding. The "space age" - the real space age, that is, when millions of people live and work in space - will involve a lot of investment in living and working accommodation in space - investment which of course must be paid back. So people who live in space must sell some services and products to the people on Earth (from where the investment came) on a large enough scale to earn sufficient profits to repay the investment (of course communications and broadcasting satellites already earn revenues - but only a few $billions per year for the space industry. By comparison, a single large company today has a turnover of $50 billion per year or more! Satellites also require no people in space so they won't bring about the development of the vehicles we need).
To date the two best ideas are two of the largest businesses on Earth - tourism and electricity - which are already $1 trillion per year and growing fast. So Space Future focuses particularly on the development of these two businesses - tourism in space, and delivering electric power from space to Earth, which will both grow to enormous size as launch costs fall. We also focus on the vehicles, and we support all promising efforts in this direction. |
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