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Commercial mining towns on Earth become cities. Company towns need commerce to drive the growth and economy of early space colonies. Water is an early resource for camp consumables plus propellant export sales from asteroid mining operations at proposed burned out comets with water methane ice cores for sustainable growth over 50 years, financed from profits and capable with affordable logistics to support resource recovery. One co‐author's perspective includes remote resource recovery sites on Earth. Other co‐authors' experiences include architecture, lunar habitation, and architectural space colony concepts. This paper combines these experiences to propose commercial opportunities possible as mankind moves beyond one planet. Alaska's North Slope commercial history indicates that different multiple logistics transportation systems are required to reduce the risk to humans and families moved in before the oil flowed. Commercial enterprises have risked $20 billion and spent hundreds of billions in private money after profits were created. The lessons learned are applied to a burned out comet designated Wilson‐Harrington (1979) and explores the architecture for early living within the burned out comet disk created from ice recovery and later sealed with an expected methane ice interior. Considered is the recovery of the resources, the transport of water back to Earth orbit or L‐1, plus later the development of more comfortable space colony living. Commercial markets produce cities on Earth and the same can happen on Space Colonies. The key is an “in place” affordable commercial logistics system that can service, stimulate and sustain a 50‐year commercial propellant market.

Space transportation has evolved to entrepreneurs offering affordable transportation services to LEO. Society expects space tourism to produce low costs quickly, but entrepreneurs need the larger commercial transportation markets to raise the private money to build the orbital vehicles. Early heavy cargo is the logistics model of remote bases on Earth and is likely to be similar for off planet remote bases. Public Private Partnerships (PPP), (Norment, 2006) and other alliances with governments offer new transportation markets and combines private funding with government markets to accelerate the movement of mankind into space, (Kistler, 2004a). Entrepreneurs bring change like a multitude of innovation, changes to the traditional aerospace industry status quo, commercial market forces and the lowering of the cost of transportation to orbit. Within PPPs, government stretches space budgets, increases vehicle innovation without cost and gains cost advantages of larger markets. Examples of PPPs show some opportunity for change in space commerce is possible, (Stainback, 2000 and Spekman, 2000). Some of the items entrepreneurs bring include innovation in hardware, a maturing of the normal market forces such as the pressures from buyers and sellers rather than those from government planners or from regulation. Launch costs are high, society wants orbital hotels and current/future markets are not emerging because of high transportation costs. The paper proposes a new approach with examples, because mankind has taken a long time to transition from expendable launch vehicles to newer more affordable launch innovation and may require the introduction of new innovative approaches.

GLOBAL OUTPOST, Inc., in cooperation with NASA, proposes to place a Space Shuttle External Tank (ET) in orbit for commercial purposes. The OUTPOST External Tank derived platform discussed in this paper is designed to service a commercial market and will also be available for governmental use. The platform requires power for its operation and will sell power to customers as one of 68 different commercial services offered. A number of alternatives for power systems are under study. The company expects to purchase a power subsystem from the available alternatives. The proposed facility will require 4 to 10 kW of power and remain in orbit for five or more years. The plan will combine private sector funding with NASA assistance to create a business location in orbit. While the ET normally falls just short of orbital velocity, it can be placed in orbit with little additional energy. The platform proposed is a minimum cost, man visited facility aimed at attracting commercial ventures seeking a low cost way to us...