ISDC 2003 - 2nd Half and Conclusions

05/26/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

I'm a little late on the 2nd half due to networking issues in San Jose (I think I'm going to ditch Mandrake and go back to RedHat) and the general lack of motivation I get after the third beer. Sunday was equally interesting with more reports from launch systems startups, presentations from the Colony Fund and Liftport. I also met one of the happiest, most energetic people in the business but more on that latter (they call that a teaser ;-).

The day started out with reports on Microcosm's Scorpius launch family. Its an iterative launch development process that is focusing on making the “expendable” part of the process as low cost as possible. The analogy they used was that of a milk bottle 50 years ago (recycled, expensive, etc) with a cardboard milk carton of today (built to be thrown away). For example, the only part of their engine that isn't ablative is the injector plate. They have chamber construction down to the $5000 range and will be using economies of scale to drive down costs. Their funding is mostly governmental though so I'm sure they could drive down costs further by not having to deal with that procurement overhead.

Others reported that day including XCOR (nothing knew other than some pictures of their 1800 lb engine and that I finally met Rich Pournelle (Jerry's son) who handles Investor Relations), JP Aerospace (balloons!), and High Speed Launch Platforms (horizontal maglev rails that use rockets instead of magnetic attraction for thrust).

The meetings that dominated the Enterprise Track were the presentation by the Colony Fund and Liftport. The Colony Fund gave us details on fund structure, goals and requirements. The Colony Fund 1 will be a 30 year, closed end fund driven by VC principles with a target capitalization of $500 million. Shares will cost $100 with a 10 share minimum purchase. The portfolio will contain a 25% conventional debt/equity component that is typical of most balanced funds, 5% for the 'Adventure Fund' which is extremely high risk, with the balance in the “Venture Portfolio” targeting the entire spectrum of space related opportunities (for obvious reasons they will be targeting 'dual use' products since their short term ROI is much better).

Liftport spent a large amount of time answering the typical 'space elevator' questions such as meteor impact, lightning, balance, failure modes, etc. He did spend some time talking about the construction of the needed capital markets which was interesting since most ventures simply assume that is something they can't build. Michael Laine did point out that this venture was one of the few in the space business that had huge economies of scale, price elasticities, and short term ROI from the carbon nanotube developments. Between this and the balloon stuff from JP Aerospace, I'm wondering if chemical rockets really are as big a component of the future as we thought.

The one session that wasn't high on my priority list was the Yuri's Night presentation. But you could tell that Loretta Hidalgo had to be one of the happiest people in the industry so it seemed to be much more 'fun' than the rest of the sessions. Her goal is to put the 'cool' back into space for the GenX/Y crowd (18-35 year olds). I just turned 34 so I guess that makes me an old fart. Besides Yuri's Night, Loretta is also involved in something called Space Generation which is an organization of “active young (minded) people that strive to enhance the quality of life on a global scale by utilising space, in all its aspects.” What's interesting is the United Nations origins of Space Generation. We had a rather interesting discussion at dinner over that. Especially with the number of libertarians at the table.

I attempted to find a Yuri's Night party in Atlanta back in April but was disappointed not to find anyone who had even heard of it. The closest one was in Macon (!). So Loretta may have inspired me to set one up here for next year. Anyway, during the discussion I raised the question about the role of private enterprise with Yuri's Night and with Space Generation and was assured that there was a role. Apparently at the previous Yuri's Night folks like XCOR came out and test fired some engines. Loretta's association with The Space Frontier Foundation also helps.

My overall impression of the weekend was a good one, well worth the money spent on getting there. The Hyatt's food choices could have been better for the money but that's just me being the dot-com travel snob. I was struck though by the split-brain aspect of the weekend. The Enterprise Track was run primarily by Bob Hillhouse from the Space Frontier Foundation while the rest of the tracks were typical NSS members. There was very little crossing between the two which was sad. The technology for getting into space has been around since 1969. Any future mankind may have in space isn't going to be solved with technology, but with the one single thing that has improved the position of manking better than any other: capitalism.

The one little item that illustrated this to me were the badges. They rarely had your affiliation on them. And the print was small. We'll know we're actually capable of something when we have trade show style badges (with mag stripes for swiping at booths and our company names in huge 50 point type). A very good weekend. You should go to the next one!