By contrast, most people, at least in the rich countries, would like to take a trip to space for themselves if it was possible - market research has shown this. However, most people also think they never will, because they believe that space travel is impossible for ordinary people,
"...otherwise NASA would already be doing it".
During the cold war, the US government set up an agency to compete with the Soviet Union in sending government employees into space on top of missiles. Whether that was a good idea or not is a big subject - though most people would agree that by putting the first man on the Moon, Apollo 11 won the USA huge recognition around the world.
However, whatever the merits of the "space race" were from a political point-of-view, riding missiles is no way to travel! It's far too unreliable, and far too expensive. If aeroplanes were thrown away after every flight, air travel would never have become a business!
Since using throw-away rockets is so expensive, the agencies should stop spending huge amounts of taxpayers' money on non-urgent activities developing and using expendable launch vehicles. These vehicles are a dead end; they can NEVER "open the space frontier". The truth is, the launch industry must be the most old-fashioned industry in the world. Is there any other industry that still uses vehicles designed 40 years ago?
So if government space agencies have a role in the post cold-war world, their main priority should be to reduce the cost of launch and improve its reliability radically. Then the public can travel to and from space for themselves, and the agencies' own activities will become much less expensive. In order to make space travel commercially practical we need fully reusable launch vehicles, designed for repeated use like commercial aircraft.
But, what most people don't appreciate is that the space agencies are making almost NO effort to develop such vehicles. Out of the $25 billion of taxpayers' money which the government space agencies around the world spend each year, over the past 10 years not even 1% has been used to try to open space up to the public who pay for these agencies.
Today, satellites are used for communications, broadcasting and photography ('remote sensing') - but these are small-scale activities, a few $billion per year, that will never need humans in space. (By comparison, a single large company today has a turnover of $30 billion/year.) These activities are not leading towards a future in which ordinary members of the public can travel to orbit and back. So unless specific efforts are made to start space travel services, they won't happen as a natural consequence of today's space activities - however much money the agencies are given.
What space agencies' role should be in the post-cold-war world is debatable - but the fact is that they are NOT trying to open space to the public. They weren't originally set up to consider the commercial aspects of space, so it's not really surprising that they're taking so long to even recognise the issue. For example, almost none of the work reported in Space Future comes from the agencies.
So it's most important to see that the fact that the agencies have not yet developed launch systems suitable for popular space travel does NOT mean that it isn't possible. They haven't tried. They haven't tried, and they aren't trying now. They're carrying on doing what they did for decades during the cold war, but using falling budgets. Once people understand this, then we can see a) that making popular space travel available is a realistic project, and b) we have to take some active steps to get it to happen.
The good news is that the penny is dropping. Recently Mr Goldin the head of NASA has stated that reducing the cost of launch by 90% is a priority. True, he faces plenty of opposition within NASA - from those spending the 98% of the budget that isn't aimed at reducing the cost of access to space!
So through the next 4 years NASA will spend all of 2% of its budget on reusable launch vehicle projects. NASA is also cooperating with the private "Space Transportation Association" (STA) based in Washington DC on a study of space tourism. So it can reasonably claim that it's making some effort towards reducing launch costs.
NASA also published this picture of a sports stadium on the Moon in 1996: