ABSTRACT
There are individuals, many individuals, who think about space in terms of inevitability, but not the inevitability of warfare. Instead they think about the inevitability of the development of space, much like the development of the American West or development of the automobile or computer industries. They believe that space offers untold commercial and resource opportunities that will inevitably be tapped. Private sector entrepreneurs are working independently and in partnerships with government agencies in unprecedented ways toward the development of space as both a geographic domain and an industrial sector, ways that had been anticipated decades ago but did not begin to materialize on a broad scale until recently. Currently, “private commercial space activities have eclipsed government activities in economic value.”1 The needs of these space developers, however, are somewhat contradictory.
