One little bit of trivia detail you might want to correct here… mainly an order of magnitude issue.
The Interstate Highway System supports not just millions of trips, but rather **BILLIONS** of trips each year. Yeah, this is minor, but it also goes to show how far the commercial spaceflight industry might be able to expand if the opportunity was there.
A more appropriate comparison is with the commercial aviation industry, where it is millions of flights that happen each year carrying billions of passengers (where one trip is counted as one passenger). I see no reason to doubt that given economic circumstances and opportunities in space, that such a similar passenger load could develop with interplanetary flights
I wholeheartedly agree that the comparison of the CEV to the interstate highway system is completely inaccurate. It is more comparable to perhaps nuclear submarine deployments, where multi-billion dollar machines are being used to send government employees to distant lands and places using advanced technology in a closed self-contained environment. Even then, I somehow get the feeling that the Navy does a much better job than NASA even with this. If only a NASA spacecraft had the turn-around time and readiness standards of a nuclear sub! I think it could happen, but not with this design.
