Space companies eye HI as potential new frontier (AP)

Up, up, & away!

Where are you going to go???? The moon is several days away and who wants to look at a bunch of bleak landscape. Mars will take you about 6 months. Mars is too cold and you can't breathe the atmosphere. From there, you are talking years to get anyplace. You can't travel at the speed of light much less beyond it. Spend money on Mother Earth where it counts.

"The higher you go, the smaller it gets," he said. "You definitely get a sense of the uniqueness of this fragile blue marble that we live on."

Yes, it's fragile. The other potential is that eventually people may figure out how to live in space. The light at the end of that tunnel is not visible yet, however. My guess is maybe a couple of centuries away, but who knows.

If Elton John had lived five hundred years ago, he would have changed the lyrics to:
"The Atlantic ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact it's cold and wet as hell.
And there's no one there to raise them if you did.
And all the boat building I don't understand.
It's just my job five days a week.
I'm a boatwright man...

He is no Columbus.

When I think about it I"m pretty lucky, I was priviledged see a lot of places in the Pacific before we turned them into trash. I've seen prettier beaches than Waikiki....without a lot of damn hotels spoiling the view. Walked on islands that had played a part in the history of WWII but most of all a clean unspoiled view, and now when I go back with Google Earth I can barely recognize places that I have been. There is one constant, where the western world is concerned wherever we go we take something and ruin it in the name of making it better. .
Now for HI, why not fire off space flights from there, they've done damn near everything else to it...

Sign me up!

$200,000.00 a trip, and Hawaii is going to spend $500,000.00 for a licence to build a space port? Any State that spends that kind of money to put rich people into space should be jailed just for being stupid.

Yea! Something else for the rich and elite to look forward to.

meanwhile, in the world of reality, the space shuttle is still broken.

What brainiac came up with this idea? The people in that state need to really do an impact study to see what this would do to their environment. Between storing the rocket fuel and exhaust from the liftoffs, there will be significant widespread damage to the environment. With the dangers of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions always present. This seems to be a way for some rich azzholes to gouge the public while destroying the environment and getting some vacation estates in the deal.

They may have to close the zoo in Boston and there are idiots who want to spend money on this nonsense. In a word....disgusting

I'm to the point where i don't even like to read popular science. they have been making promises for the past fifty years that space travel is just around the corner...and yet it seems that only kenney could take us to the moon.. lucky that the pilgrims didn' t do it that way. we would still be sending probes to the americas

What! The Space Shuttle should remain broken and Nasa should be shut down. What a waste of tax dollars NASA is. This thing in Hawaii is the way space exploration shoudl be done -- in the private sector with private money!

You should check out Virgin Galactic. The new 'Spaceship two" should be ready to go by fall.

The reason the blue marble is fragile is because space projects trash if out and don't care one bit to take care of it..