Rocketforge

I wasn’t able to be there so I had to watch the webcast while sitting in a exhibition booth at a supply chain management show in Baltimore. I had a small crowd watching along with me. Very exciting! Very motivating!

In this CNN Money article Branson announces “that Virgin Group would begin offering space flights in 2007 for groups of up to five passengers.” The price tag is $198,600. It seems its as some predicted: Allen funds it, Burt builds and flies it, and Branson brands it and handles the ticketing. Neat little mix of strengths.

Update: Details from HobbySpace, the Virgin Galactic homepage, and the Scaled Composites press release…

In this Spaceflight Now article on Bigelow Aerospace and their phenomenal progress has this nugget:

Company founder and millionaire Robert T. Bigelow told Aviation Week & Space Technology that he will announce as early as this week a new $50-million space launch contest called America’s Space Prize.

The objective is to spur development of a low-cost commercial manned orbital vehicle capable of launching 5-7 astronauts at a time to Bigelow inflatable modules by the end of the decade.

America’s Space Prize will be patterned somewhat after the X Prize that will go to the first team to demonstrate back-to-back suborbital flights.

America’s Space Prize, however, is to award five times more money than the $10-million X Prize. And if successful, the winner of America’s Prize would have developed something different – the first commercial manned orbital spacecraft – which unlike the X Prize, could be used for something other than just a spectacular ride.

The new contest also presents challenges far greater than the X Prize by requiring development of a vehicle that could maneuver to dock at well over 100 mi. altitude and survive a 17,500-mph. reentry.

America’s Prize will be set up so the winner can propose launch on an existing (even non-U.S.) booster, depending upon the entrant’s spacecraft configuration.

Bigelow is committing $25 million to the prize, and more than one additional proprietary benefactor is in final discussion with Bigelow for the other half. Potential funding partners include NASA, as a follow-up to the prize-related recommendations by the Aldridge Commission on Exploration.

In addition to the $50 million, the America’s Prize winner would also be guaranteed first rights on a contract from Bigelow for ongoing orbital servicing missions to its inflatable 45 X 22- ft. “Nautilus” modules – possibly docked together as a small space station.

Go read the whole thing!

From the What-The-Hell-Were-You-Thinking Department: Sam Dinkin gets extremely close to advocating credit card and securities fraud in Don’t read this column. In the classic silliness of things like “Don’t Steal This Book” he suggests that one might fund your favorite space startup with massive amounts of money stolen from credit card companies by driving up your credit limit and then ‘cashing out’. He also suggests that you can get around the qualified investor requirement by simply lying to the corporation you want to invest in.

The first is completely unethical and is nothing but pure theft from a credit card company. Why don’t we just find the CEO of Visa and just car-jack him? The second is a good way to get your favorite new startup in some deep and really expensive doggy doo with the SEC.

I simply can’t understand why someone would suggest these ideas when there are perfectly reasonable methods for investing in small startups that provide legal exceptions to the SEC filing requirements. This is the exact route that The Liftport Group is using.

There are no get rich quick schemes. There is no silver bullet. If you want to fund you space startup then you need to learn how to run a company by doing it. By building wealth by giving profitable value to customers. Suggesting anything else is going to doom this entire business to the silliness that has kept us in LEO for the past 50 years.

Come on Jeff, yank that article before it gets you , Sam or anyone else in trouble. And if I were XCOR I’d insist that my name was yanked from that byline.

Found via comment on Transterrestrial Musings:

SpaceDev Begins Work on ”Dream Chaser” Space Vehicle Space Act MOU Signed with NASA Ames Research Center

Hmm… VTHL. I wouldn’t have expected Jim to go that route. It just doesn’t seem his style. I wonder what Burt thinks about that.

From space.com

“…a Kennedy Space Center spokesman, confirmed Wednesday that the piece discovered two weeks ago was from the shuttle’s crew compartment area and contains a hinged window.”