An Atlantic Monthly article by Gregg Easterbrook carried in the Australian Financial Review uses a profile of Sea Launch to examine the recent history of the commercial space launch industry.
Of course, near the end he throws in the usual “conventional wisdom”:
Talk of returning to the moon or of people exploring Mars will remain whimsy until someone figures out a much less expensive means of putting pounds into space.
Ah, yes, the old bootstrapping problem.
HobbySpace takes a poke at the article, and sums up my own thoughts on it quite well, calling it “a space transportation article created with his usual weird mix of keen insights and half-truths, right-on comments and silly one-liners, extensive research and huge holes in that research”. Worth a read for the interesting history bits, but take his conclusions with a grain of salt.