SPACE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM DESIGN IMPLICATIONS OF EMERGING SPACE TOURISM MARKETS

摘要

The advent of the new space tourism marketplace has brought a new set of commercial customers needing space transport vehicles and supporting capabilities. Yet even this new customer set has been unable to stimulate the development of new reusable space transportation systems. A system dynamic model is developed in an attempt to better understand the causal relationships, motivational influences, and interrelationships within this system. The results show that even though great economic potentials exist, that threshold tipping-points exist which prevents activation of these self-reinforcing market growth loops. Additionally, a growth dynamics sub-model is run against the recently activated space tourism market loop that indicates that this market will follow an "S-growth", not a linear growth trend.