Today I visited the offices of MadeInSpace – a startup building 3-D printers for space applications- and spoke to one of the founders.  On top of the extremely cool technology, I was impressed by his outlook, which combined massive breadth and optimism with a hearty dose of reality. 

Not a direct quote, but the outlook was essentially “One day we want it to be possible to build anything you need in space, including massive space stations and other spacecraft, but we realize we’re just a small component of that vision and are demonstrating that 3-D printing in space is feasible and useful at all by putting a single small unit on the ISS for now.”

 It’s this sort of balance of optimism and vision with reality and realistic goals that I think defines the ‘sweet spot’ near the tinfoil hat line, and is something that the business of space exploration needs more of.