Here’s some more on Esther Dyson’s overpriced space entrepreneur conference:

“Nobody’s holding a space conference, so I decided to do one,” she said in an interview. “It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want to be.”

So it wasn’t just hype on the web site. She really is clueless about what’s been going on in this field. This is both disappointing, coming from Freeman’s (for whom my respect is boundless) daughter, and annoying. A lot of us have been in the trenches trying to make this stuff happen for years, even decades. We’ve overpaid our dues, and now we get to deal with an Esther-come-lately.

And she can’t even be bothered to focus on the subject at hand:

The conference, which costs $1,492 to attend, is also aimed at taking on a topic of more immediate potential – a concept called “air taxi.” A growing number of entrepreneurs are looking at using relatively small, inexpensive airplanes to revive and expand the short-hop commuter industry, ferrying people to and from small airports.

That’s an interesting subject, but it has little to do with space technology, and all it will due is further dilute the utility of this one-day conference. I said I’d like to go if I could afford the time and the money, but now I’m thinking that even if I did, I’d get little out of it.

I’m not sure what to say at this point. Walt Anderson, bankroller of several emerging space companies (some of which I’ve worked for and with), has been arrested for tax evasion:

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said the allegations mark the largest criminal tax case against an individual.

Anderson, 51, earned millions by dealing in telecommunications companies after the AT&T breakup and became a global figure about five years ago when he embarked on a mission to try to rescue the ailing Russian Mir space station.

I hadn’t talked to him since last June, at the first SS1 flight into space, in Mojave.

Without speaking to the merits of the case, it’s safe to say that this will put a severe crimp into the capability of the first dotcom millionaire who was putting his money where his mouth was to continue to support space entrepreneurs.

[Via NASA Watch]

[Update on Tuesday morning]

Here’s more from the New York Times:

The Justice Department said that Mr. Anderson was involved in starting long-distance telecommunications businesses as the industry was being deregulated, and that he realized in the early 1990’s that the merger of his first successful company, Mid-Atlantic Telecom, with another company would result in substantial taxable earnings.

To avoid paying those taxes, the department said, he formed an offshore corporation called Gold & Appel Transfer in the British Virgin Islands and hired a trust company to serve as Gold & Appel’s registered agent and sold director. Gold & Appel was owned by another British Virgin Islands company previously formed by Mr. Anderson, the department said.

Mr. Anderson structured his dealings so that he had complete, albeit hidden, control of the corporations, prosecutors said. They said he further obscured his holdings by forming another offshore corporation in Panama, transferring Gold & Appel shares to that entity and having the shares sent to a mail drop in Amsterdam that he had rented under an alias.

The indictment said Mr. Anderson concealed his illegal dealings from his accountants, repeatedly tried to thwart I.R.S. inquiries, sometimes used the alias “Mark Roth” and falsely proclaimed himself a citizen of the Dominican Republic when he opened accounts with a New Jersey bank.

Gold & Appel (prounounced “Golden Apple”) was the investment source for many of his investments, including Rotary Rocket, Mircorp, and others. I don’t know, but suspect that it also provided the seed funding and endowment for the FINDS fund.

Well, can’t have that money funding projects that could get us off the planet. Much better to sink it in that vast black hole known as the federal budget, of course.

[Update at 9:45 PM EST]

Here’s more (though for some unaccountable reason the NYT reporter consistently misspells Gold & Appel as “Gold and Appeal”):

Mr. Anderson has long attracted a certain level of public attention, especially when he tried to arrange a rescue of the Mir space station five years ago. He frequently flew in a private jet and made deals involving millions of dollars. At conferences on space travel he often spoke of his hatred of government…

…Gary Hudson of Redwood City, Calif., said that Mr. Anderson invested $30 million in his Rotary Rocket, the primary backing for a private rocket launching and recovery firm that ultimately failed.

“One condition of his investment was that we could not take any government money,” Mr. Hudson said in a telephone interview on Monday.

I guess that occasionally it’s possible to be a little too libertarian.

[Update at 11:20 AM EST]

Here’s one more, the longest piece on the story yet, from the WaPo.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.