Blogging from Space Frontier Conference 13

10/07/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

I'm 'back' from vacation and now at Space Frontier Conference 13. Rick is giving the welcome address right now (and doing the Sagan/Von Braun/O'Neil bit. His von Braun impersonation seemed to meld into the Governator which cracked up the entire room).

The mood here is jubilant but very aware that there's a lot more work to be done.

Update: We're into the Space Access Society/Alt.Space session which is a session run by Henry Vanderbilt as a follow on to the Space Access Society conference earlier this year. Right now we're getting an update from Rocketplane.

Next up is Jared Smith of Andrews Space and Technology. Andrews is a “Government approved Small Minority Woman Owned Disadvantaged Business”. Intereting to see how that helps with non-governmental payloads/contracts. Ahh… its founders came from Kistler. Focusing on “Government programs that can be leveraged into commercial services”. IMHO, that approach means that if you don't win the contract you don't enter the market at all. They're involved in a lot of the government contract based efforts, like the Falcon project (can we stop using that name, please?), with others like Scaled and XCOR, but it doesn't seem as though they're trying to move that into non-governmental markets yet. IMHO, parallel is the way, not serial. The current slide is a complicated piece of eye-candy that shows an entire ecosystem of vehicles, systems, orbits and planets. I realize its probably fun to theorize about stuff like this but there's just no way in hell anyone's predictions about how the market will look in 2020 are remotely realistic. I'm not sure this is useful.

Jeff Greason from XCOR gave a brief update. The two take aways are 1) their phone has been ringing off the hook since Burt won the prize and 2) over half of their revenue is governmental and that, with work, you can get them to act sane.

Break for lunch….