Boy, if you’re an old L-5er, this site sure brings back memories. I remember using many (in fact all) of those slides when I’d go around and evangelize space colonization back in the late seventies and early eighties.

[Via Phil Bowermaster, who’s not the man he once was.]

G. Scott Hubbard says that entrepreneurial space is becoming very real:

Building a new space industry requires three things: demand, access to space and a platform. In the Stanford study, where we deliberately limited the investor horizon to 5-8 years, the only truly new business case that clearly closes for profitability is suborbital tourism. In this arena, the technology has proven itself available, private funding is adequate to build the vehicles, and more than enough wealthy individuals are willing to pay $100,000 or more for a short excursion to the edge of space. Space tourism is coming.

“So what,” some say. They point out that even with generous assumptions about flight rate, the business generated by suborbital companies would still be at best a tiny blip in the estimated $180-billion global space market dominated communications satellites and traditional government missions. So why do we care? The answer lies in the huge future potential for space-based goods and services.

As Boeing’s Shaw, a former astronaut, pointed out, human space travel is such a powerful personal experience that, “the more people who go, the more will want to go.” Once space becomes accessible to tourists on a regular basis, practical industries will certainly follow. If early aviation is any guide, we can say for sure that the demand is as woefully underestimated as the development costs. Still, clever advertising companies and marketers already are exploiting space connections to capture attention, and their strategies appear to be working.

I think that he’s mistaken here, though, continuing to buy into the ongoing myth of weightless research:

My own speculation about the location of space’s version of “Sutter’s gold,” as Walker called it, is with biological experimentation in microgravity. Every living organism that we know of evolved in 1g. Science never has been able to fully examine gravity as a variable. From experiments of a few days to a few weeks in space, there are tantalizing hints of radically different gene expression, unusual lignin (a compound vital to connective tissue) growth in plants, and changed rates of disease infectivity. If one assumes extraordinary new breakthrough discoveries will occur, then advanced biotechnologies and future products will arise. It’s very sad that given our current set of U.S. space priorities, only the European and Japanese programs will be able to exploit the full potential of the ISS. However, for the right entrepreneur, setting up a biology lab on the ISS

Well, everyone is talking about the New Years treat. Blue Origin finally lifts the curtain on its vehicle developments, with comments and pics from the Amazonmeister himself (note: probably not a permalink). John Carmack thinks that the vehicle is too big. Alan Boyle has more, having interviewed some of the Blue Origin folks.

I wonder where he’s getting his high-test peroxide? Is he manufacturing it in Van Horn?

There’s an interesting comment in Alan’s post, with which I don’t necessarily agree:

“In response to my inquiry about that, Hicks said, ‘I just want to remind you that we said previously we didn’t plan to comment one way or another about tests, whether they are scheduled, were scheduled, happened, didn’t happen, etc.’”

How nice. I can only think that a philosophy like that makes it sooo simple to avoid telling the (potential ticket-buying) public about any screw-ups or failures of system unless forced to by public enquiry via legal means. What kind of public relations philosophy is that for a company that wants to throw and eager public into space and bring them back for mega bucks? Methinks I will not be trusting anyone with the Madison Avenue mentality trying to sell me rides into space. Even NASA kills people in the business of trying to expand our world and species into the universe. It’s inherent in the technological challenges. The public has every right to know everything before stepping aboard Wobbly Flight 106 to nowhere in particular.

It’s not clear what the best strategy is, from a marketing standpoint. Certainly Blue Origin has been the most secretive of all of the serious players in the business, at least to date. Whether this is for competitive reasons, or because of a fear of revealing failure to customers, isn’t clear. It’s also unclear why they decided to show their stuff now, after six years of circumspection (the most prevalent theory being that the secrecy was hampering their ability to get good employees, but I’m not sure that makes sense–secret government programs manage just fine).

Does Boeing invite the public to test flights of its airliners? Did the excitement of the “corkscrewing” of SS1 increase, or decrease the confidence of potential passengers? On the one hand, it was an unexpected (and no doubt would have been unpleasant for passengers, given how upset Melvill was about it) maneuver. On the other, he recovered, so it could serve as a demonstration of the safety and robustness of the system.

I think that it’s less important to show every single flight test, than it is to demonstrate a long track record of public successful flights. The first passengers to fly on these vehicles will be less risk averse. As confidence builds with a series of safe flights, more will be confident enough to take their ride. I don’t think that early prototype test flights will really be relevant, successful or otherwise.

Of course, the great thing is that, like technical approaches, it’s not clear what the right marketing or flight test approaches are either. Now that we have a variety of entities working the problem, instead of a monolithic government agency, we’ll find out what works best the way we always do ultimately–via the market.