It Can't Be Done!

I have very little time or patience with people who say that "you can't possibly do space missions privately!" These are voices of the sadly wrong, the least imaginative people around. Precisely the same statements were made about such crude things as aeroplanes!In the 1920's, aeroplanes were just playthings of the rich...a decade later they transported the wealthy...and today we scrabble around to save a $20 here or there to make a flight to Nevada! The same trajectory will of course be duplicated with space access.

In 2015 I am flying my suit, life-support system and balloon to a great height, and, wow, that will happen despite many detractors who like to sit at their computers, telling me why I will fail!

Some time in the next few weeks explorersweb.com will run an article of mine RE our recent pressure suit tests in Copenhagen. Here is a part in which I expand on larger issues:

"It's taken a generation for the truth to sink in: we really did kill the Apollo missions, the human exploration of space. We really did quit. So at Copenhagen Suborbitals and Project ALPHA (and many other private enterprises worldwide) we are taking the first steps ourselves, retracing exactly, and slowly, and hazardously, the steps that first put humans into space just over a generation ago...Forget 'space' as the domain only of NASA or the Russian space program; both of those structures are now sad husks, each wildly out of touch with significantly reduced global economy. Forget exploring Mars on a NASA expedition; we’re going to spend the next two generations just getting our crumpled country functioning again. So we must now rebuild human space activity, from the ground up, privately. OK…let’s draw up a plan. Let’s start building." -- ((c) 2013) Cameron M. Smith