Maslow window is a hypothesis that is defined as a period of rapid change, growth, and progress assumed to be happened twice in a century. The last one has argued to be the period during Apollo program (1950-1973). According to the hypothesis, these windows have always happened though there were data points over last two hundred years only to support it. Every major event in human history tends to be clustered in 56 year bursts.
This hypothesis suggests that economic booms are the driving force behind history's biggest wars and finest engineering projects . If one considers all of the ideas that are percolating recently (as of April, 2012), such as: Planetary Resources, SpaceX, Elon Musk's proposal to Colonization of Mars, and his ideas for reusable rockets. Owen Gingerich have predicted about Moon bases by the end of the decade. Commercial space initiatives are Bigelow Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, XCOR etc. Quicklaunch is a large gas gun which can put materials in Low Earth orbit (LEO) cheaply. Stratolaunch Systems is an air launched rocket that can reach LEO safely with quick turnaround. Not to mention other ideas, such as nuclear thermal rockets and LOX-LEO. So many of these ideas could be revolutionary and prognosticate to a Maslow Window of space commercialization boom around 2015.
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