Come year-end, there will be more capital deployed in newspace in 2016 than 2015. I see that trend continuing for the foreseeable future.
There are several revenue streams that are near and present that could support a private space station, including in-space manufacturing, microgravity research, and tourism - for both individuals and sovereign nation astronauts - and in-space supply logistics.
Our focus is to get citizen astronauts to experience the 'overview effect,' return to Earth, and then impact their communities.
The bottom line is 2018 should finally be the year where we see the early stages of broad-based commercial space tourism appear. Demand will certainly be driven by the early successes or failures of those missions, the marketing of those missions, as well as the propensity for tourists to become repeat flyers.
Until space tourism is a destination-based business (e.g. flights to a private space station or to the moon), will flyers pay to fly more than once after having earned their astronaut wings? The answer to this is likely very dependent on the experience itself.
Fibers made on Earth, and thus made in the presence of gravity, have impurities and defects in the glass that adversely affect transmission speed and quality.
