space development
water, trees, a green sky
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Space development through the early 21st Century has largely involved government agencies, militaries and corporations or design bureaus performing high-constraint, low-repetition sorties in space. This applies to both human and robotic systems but less so to cash-constrained markets such as competitve telecommunications or post-Soviet passenger flights on Soyuz.
Since before the dawn of the Space Age there has been a certain "giggle factor" to all things "space". Science fiction, especially "space opera" has held sway from Buck Rogers and Star Trek into this new century. This changed significantly in 2004 with the successful XPrize flights of SpaceShipOne.
For space to become a broader-based sphere for development including utilization, settlement and exploration, the tools and techniques to Go There And Do Stuff must be widely accessible.
The space tree idea originally arose out of conversation with my friends Chris Poulin and Greg Blanchette in the mid-90s.
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