Lunar entrepreneurs: privately funded SpaceX orbits Earth.
globalpost.com
globalpost.com
"Livingston said drugs are so profitable that pharmaceutical companies could become commercial space customers if they had routine and reliable ways to get crystallization experiments into space and back again."
I have plenty of experience in the pharmaceutical industry and I have to say, if they're looking for money from this, they will be waiting a long time. This meme always makes for a nice tidy tag-line in a grant proposal for space research, but it's not really based in business reality. Protein crystal structures are certainly important in pharmaceutical development, but they rarely make or break a drug program. The problem is that protein structures obtained from crystals don't always accurately reflect what the protein does in solution. Furthermore, even if you do end up using a crystal structure to design a compound, your problem is only just beginning. The big problem with drugs is that they fail spectacularly when they get to the clinic because they have an unacceptable safety profile or they just plain don't work. The protein structure is fairly irrelevant in these cases because the rest of the biology is so maddeningly complex and unpredictable.
Kinda like how the 747 was subsidized by the AWACS contract... And they've the nerve to complain when the French government bungs a few Euros to Airbus.
Andrew Beal is pretty famous, but he's better at banking than aerospace.
There are lots of private companies building components for space exploration, but their margins are capped because their customer is the government. Atleast this is the gist I get from talking to my dad who is a program manager at Aerojet, which makes boosters for Delta and previously Titan.