Laughing Wolf has a couple good posts–one a general tutorial on writing a business plan, and another on specific issues associated with space business plans.

On the latter, though, I think he spent a little too much time at NASA. I don’t understand what he means about space tourism being a “limited” market. From my perspective, it’s the only one that’s not limited, at least in the sense that there are millions of existing payloads, and millions more are continually being manfactured by (as the old joke goes) unskilled labor. In my opinion, he has far far too much faith in space manufacturing, particularly given its dismal payoff so far, relative to the hype for the last thirty years.

I believe that there may be money to be made from this field, but it’s not going to be a major driver for reducing launch costs, because the lucrative applications (if there are any) will be those for which great value can be extracted from small amounts of mass (just as currently the most money made in space consists of delivering a few thousand pounds into orbit which then returns millions of dollars of revenue in the form of (rest) massless photons). Only tourism requires the huge amount of up and down mass that will force up launch activity, and force down costs.