We're still very early in the development of spaceflight. If you compare with the car industry, we're at the early industrialized phase, where large companies carefully start to develop the necessary technology. Now, 100 years later, a lot is standardized and the knowledge is so common that everybody has the basics, and people can build cars in their back yards. It's the same development that happened with airplanes.
At its core, a rocket isn't more complicated than a car. The challenges are just different. My dearest hope is that eventually rocket components will be as commoditized as car parts, so people can build and maintain their own spacecraft. I want to see rockets held together with duck tape and spit, because that's the point where spaceflight is available to everybody and gravity stops becoming a hurdle.
A quick disclaimer: I have the greatest respect for rocket engineers. They are taking the first steps, the most difficult ones, and I don't believe for a second that they their work is easy. I just believe that eventually, they'll become obsolete to the majority of spacetravel :)
You might be interested in Copenhagen Suborbitals (copsub.com): A danish group trying to reach space in a DIY fashion financed by donations. It's quite impressive what they've already achieved with not that much more than duct tape!
That is amazing, thank you so much for linking it. I did not know about them, and it does indeed seem like they have made a lot of progress. I'll be following them from now :)
It's true that orbit is more challenging, but you have no hope of getting there if you can't do a suborbital jump first. Aiming for suborbital first might see them get a lot more funding if they succeed. You need to learn to crawl before you can run.
At its core, a rocket isn't more complicated than a car. The challenges are just different. My dearest hope is that eventually rocket components will be as commoditized as car parts, so people can build and maintain their own spacecraft. I want to see rockets held together with duck tape and spit, because that's the point where spaceflight is available to everybody and gravity stops becoming a hurdle.
A quick disclaimer: I have the greatest respect for rocket engineers. They are taking the first steps, the most difficult ones, and I don't believe for a second that they their work is easy. I just believe that eventually, they'll become obsolete to the majority of spacetravel :)