I’ve long complained that NASA’s efforts to reduce costs were misdirected, because their focus was on technology (which is a problem, but not a major one) rather than new markets and financing (which is the problem). We’ve long known that many people would go into space if they could afford it–polls have always shown it–but NASA has steadfastly ignored this, instead always perverting every launch study they do into a replacement for the Shuttle–oversized, and underflown (the most recent example being X-33, though the SLI program shows signs of the same debilitating tendency).

They have spent (and in most cases, wasted) billions of dollars on this, when a tiny fraction of a percent of the funds that they’ve spent on these technology efforts could have funded some serious market polling that vehicle developers and investors could literally take to the bank.

Finally, after many years, a mere trickle of the NASA new-vehicle funding (this time out of the Space Launch Initiative) has gone toward this end, which will have value far beyond the billions previously spent on technology and system studies.

A NASA contractor, Futron, has directed Zogby International to do a poll, using funding from their market-analysis contract with NASA. Unlike previous polls, which queried the general public, this one focused on people with the actual means to go.

The unsurprising (to me) result is that rich folks are like any other–half of them want to go, and are willing to pay what it costs. Mark Shuttleworth isn’t a weirdo–he’s typical. Of course, the way in which the rich folks aren’t like you and me is that they can afford to.

To me, this is one of the most exciting things that’s happened in space in a long time (partly because I’ve been advocating it for many years). It will go a long way toward making investors take this market more seriously, the previous lack of which has been holding us back. The frustrating thing, of course, is that it could have been done any time over the past couple decades, had we had more visionary people running the agency.