I’ll be driving back down to LA tomorrow, down the coast, so I may not be posting much until tomorrow night or Tuesday. Thoughts on the conference later.
9 thoughts on “Conference Over”
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I’ll be driving back down to LA tomorrow, down the coast, so I may not be posting much until tomorrow night or Tuesday. Thoughts on the conference later.
Comments are closed.
The conference was incredibly .. academic. With not much concern for immediate applications, commercialization paths, sustainable business routes of getting there.
Dusting off G. K. O’Neill models and shaving off 3 years of 25 years payoff time of entirely hypothetical space settlement based revenues from completely hypothetical SBSP ? Really ? Spending hours to discuss on how to close a resource usage loop on an entirely hypothetical deep space mission, on a space _resources and industry_ oriented conference ? Why ? Why would you want to close a water loop if dr. Spudis just convinced everyone that there is enough water there to last thousands of years. And so on.
Also, i am not sure how one can hope to conquer an entire new frontier without involving huge numbers of young, naive and enthusiastic people, that have not yet been told about what cannot be done.
The only ray of light there were the guys from MadeInSpace.
Why wouldn’t SSI invite a bunch of students from CMU, Stanford etc to attend ?
Generally, its obviously an interesting conference, but it would be excellent if it stayed more grounded in reality, and near term, immediate applications, that could actually have some economic value.
And that will come off as disrespectful, but : Keeping referencing for how long you have stayed researching the topic ( nineteen eighty something or was it seventy nine ? ) without anything real to show for it, is NOT helping your case.
Ok, what i was trying to say above : if i was an investor, i would run away from most of that crowd. Fast.
I’m sorry that you were under the misapprehension that this was a conference for investors. We didn’t mean to disappoint you.
All of the above was why we needed the FY11 budget untouched.
The bill, as originally presented hardly scratched the surface of the things that need to be done before we can begin to think of going anywhere beyond LEO.
The Senate version of the bill that was finally passed cuts the first tentative steps back to a crawl.
Oh well…
SBSP is the short term in-space industry that gets us out of missionitis, and unlike space tourism it requires the construction of in-space infrastructure. It’s funny, whenever people talk about Bigelow’s stations it’s in relation to sovereign customers who just want to fly humans for prestige, or space tourism – the continuing “hotel” concept that the media won’t let go. Meanwhile, the SBSP people have completely abandoned human spaceflight, and even RLVs are considered too far off to be of use in first generation systems.
So it’s possible to imagine these three industries developing in parallel with no crossover. Suborbital tourism companies may never enter the orbital tourism market. Bigelow and other private space stations may never offer space to orbital tourism. SBSP may develop without access to any human spaceflight or the reusable vehicles that come out of the tourism and sovereign customer markets.
But it seems more likely there will be a little crossover.
>>SBSP is the short term in-space industry
No it isnt. Until someone spends that $50M dollars that John Mankins mentioned.
The dollars for the first ever fully integrated demo, to power a lightbulb on earth using beamed power from orbit.
I think he lowballed the figure, ignoring launch costs and the regulatory hurdles.
Until that demo happens, its all pipedreaming.
>>I’m sorry that you were under the misapprehension
Well, i wasn’t. Well familiar with the agenda, and i’ve read proceedings of similar conferences before.
Even then, the complete lack of focus on near term practical steps on how to get from where things are today to everyones favorite O’Neill colony slide backdrops was kind of surprising.
A few presentations stood out though.
Joe Carroll’s tethers on LEO looks mature enough to actually be implemented. He made a remark about how tethers are never taken seriously. I wish he would have put a price tag on how much would it take to demonstrate the capability.
Dr. Spudis was energetic and presented real results, tangible progress.
REAL teleoperated robotics by Greg Baiden, and Seegrid were obviously good.
Venter was completely off topic, but probably the most interesting presentation at all.
Wayne White on law and Eva-Jane Lark on economic incentives were both hugely interesting, most of the crowd ignored them completely.
And like i said above, MadeInSpace guys, actually DOING something were excellent as well.
“…the complete lack of focus on near term practical steps on how to get from where things are today to everyones favorite O’Neill colony slide backdrops was kind of surprising.”
One of the larger such steps is arranging affordable transportation, and while that’s obviously not the primary focus of the Space Manufacturing conference, the conference ran a session on transportation. They were also kind enough to give me a few minutes to plug next April’s Space Access conference – April 7-9 in Phoenix, watch http://www.space-access.org for details as they’re pinned down.
SSI’s principals agree with us that space manufacturing and space access are highly complementary fields – we have much work still to do on both the means to get there and the methods to do useful things once there.
All of which is why we’ve been helping SSI out in their efforts to revive this conference. Successful efforts, I’d say. Yes, there was the usual space conference fraction of blue-sky impracticality and Sessions We Have Seen Before, but these were sandwiched around numerous signs of real and useful and sometimes spectacular progress since the last time this conference was held.
Okay, so bear with me here as I’ll be employing a fair amount of speculative thinking.
From everything I’ve studied, it seems like the post-1930’s regulatory environment has pretty much crushed the effectiveness of ‘frontier’ industries. An example, somewhat out-of-place, but demonstrative, is anti-trust. A company that is successful in pioneering a new market will almost inevitably monopolize that market. Look at Alcoa, Microsoft.
I would contend that our government in its current economic policies (not Obama’s, rather post-war) destroys the incentives for private capital to fund, seek, and employ new ideas.
Combine this with the ever-increasing funding of higher education through public means since the 1940’s.
In conclusion, the manner in which our society produces and processes specialized knowledge – especially if it’s new – doubly especially if that knowledge is of potential value for investment – is perhaps all wrong. Not only in the sense that there are arrangements and avenues for knowledge production of incredible variety that are not even being employed, but also in the sense the monolithic academy is perhaps very primitive and backwards in its ability to produce meaningful advancements in knowledge.
Climategate, the awful state of philosophy and the humanities, the slow confused advancement in physics, the deplorable failures in economics, the inability to rigorously incorporate alternative or dissenting theories, the infighting and squabbling for funds, the monolithic political culture, and on and on…
I would contend that until the institution of higher education – indeed education in general – is fundamentally reformed in our society (and our system is still in fact the best and the model for the rest), we’ll never get anywhere in space.
SSI is the sort of insitution needed. Private industry needs a place to turn in order to know what to do. In the past, SSI was tied to the Academy. Hopefully, with all this tea party culture going on right now, there will be a place for entities like SSI to transcend that origin.
SSI has to be academic. Academic means rigorous analytical knowledge. Our society needs this in order to know what to invest in, and how to do it ethically and safely. But academic has become a bad word because of the awful state of the Academy.
In conclusion, I’m pretty excited that it’s back. But I have to make the overall point that the root problem to be solved is quite bigger than either the Institute or the industry. But coming off from that point, I also would mention that groups like the Institute can be part of the solution.
The NewSpace guys really really have to band together. On SSI in particular. The government is proposing an international SSA solution, someone’s talking about a space guard, no one knows what’s going on. So, don’t wait for a solution, make one.