Privatizing Space will do the same thing for it that privatizing the Internet did for all of us. It will take a government-pioneered oddity that was out of reach of the masses and explore millions of ways to make it of financial benefit to the entrepreneurs who can get there first. Like with the Internet, society will be pulled along in the vortex of the Race to Space. Space will become accessible for a price and in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade before.
The technical challenges with space travel are much greater and so the time before we reach the exponential part of the curve is further away, but when the critical mass of Space travel technology has been reached it will be like the Internet in the 1990's. The Internet had been around for 20 years and only governmental and academic types even knew anything about it. Within a few years of its commercialization, its use and uses had exploded. We went from the average joe not knowing anything about it to seeing an abundance of commercials on television for it within just a couple of years.
I mention the Internet, but the pattern is one that you can see in the adoption of transatlantic sailing, rail travel, electricity, automobiles, etc. Space travel will be no different.
Substantially cheaper price to orbit will allow us to start doing things like economically assembling large spacecraft in space.
A cheaper method to orbit is a necessary building block of everything else, and so far NASA hasn't been able to do that. Congress views NASA as a giant jobs program, and as long as they are running NASA, cheap isn't realistic.
A cheaper method to orbit is in fact not a necessary building block. It's nice to have, of course. I'm sure we'll end up with more useful stuff in orbit, which is a good thing. But space exploration has so many building blocks still simply missing, this won't change anything fundamentally.
I tire of statements like this. Either you have no capacity for exaggeration, or I have grossly misunderstood and the docking is actually more momentous than the discoveries of fire, DNA, germ theory, cell theory, flight, and nuclear physics combined.
Now, if we figure out how to beat aging and live forever, that is something whose impact might be difficult to overstate.
Getting investment for such a company probably wouldn't have been possible without a private space industry.
Most importantly, if we could cure aging and necessarily cancer, then you can bet we would have the sophisticated understanding of genes, proteins and cells required to fully control our genome.