Leonard David has a good piece this morning on the prospects for commercial space.

There was actually a mini debate between Elon Musk and Alex Tai at their press conference at the Personal Spaceflight Symposium last month, in which Alex expressed skepticism as to whether New Space can be comparable to the Dotcom industry, in terms of the potential for huge returns and wealth generation. Elon thought that there would be some sort of significant funding event that would open the investor floodgates, as happened with IT, and Alex thought that this was a more conventional industry, with more conventional rates of return. But he also expressed hope that he's wrong.

We may find out in the next couple years, given the list of potential events that could occur in that time frame that Leonard lays out.

I tend to agree with Elon and Alex!

Launch vehicles are never going to make that much money as the entire metric that everyone seeks to implement (higher flight rates and cheaper costs) means that the net revenue is not going to be that high for a very long time.

I do agree with Elon that a significant funding event applied at the right spot will change the game for the positive and unleash the real space age. However, this obsession with fire and smoke and sending money down a rat hole is not going to be it.

Barriers to entry have to be a lot lower for there to be a valid comparison to dotcoms. It's more like trying to build a website in the 70's or a personal computer in the 50's.

The dotcoms made their money (the real money, not the bubble) by implementing a one-time major productivity upgrade for every sector in the economy, from retail (e.g., Amazon) to banking. Further productivity upgrades are continuing, but they're not as big as that shift to doing things onl1ne (I'm including modern internal networks here).

So, I think it'd be fairly unreasonable to expect that kind of an impact; it would have to be bigger than the entire commsat market to move that kind of a needle.

That said, if you're looking at *personal* wealth generation for investors, I think there might be one or two plays, but you can't expect to see the massive stock performances of the dotcoms, not unless somebody invents something that can only be manufactured in space, and done so at great profit.

Maybe a more apt analogy is to consider today's hot commodity markets or 19th century precious metal rushes. If New Space opens the solar system to economic development and the global economy has a voracious demand for certain resources, be they mineral or energy, one could mine the sky for wealth.