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Dennis Wingo is giving an overview and update on Orbital Recovery. Nothing new. But he is stressing the fact that most of the work they thought they had to do has already been done by several of the existing aerospace companies/organizations in Europe. Current status: customer acquisition phase in progress for first and second launches. Contracts with vendors (DLR, Dutch Space, Ariane, ESA) signed. First launch is scheduled in '07. They're funded through round 2.

David Anderman from Constellation Services is talking about a new CSI project for a manned lunar flyby mission in 2 years called “Lunar Express”. One paying customer makes it viable if the cost is low enough. They want to use the Soyuz taxi mission to provide the pressure vessel then they launch an TLI booster to get the Soyuz into lunar flyby orbit.

Now we're hearing from Bill Boland about a new Space Frontier Foundation project called “nexSpace”. Its a 'shadow' space program from a 'policy/legal/etc' standpoint. Providing the joint development of documentation/policy/legal frameworks, etc for the alt.space community to flourish. I'm curious how this relates to my CDSVN project. Its still not clear what the actual projects activities will be. So far Bill is just saying what we want to eventually happen, not how to get there or what the project will actually do and how.

The question of exactly what will be done is that the entire thing sounds like an open source/collaberative resource for policy development. More as soon as I find out what that means to those doing the work.

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Xprize Cup update: we just heard an update on the Xprize Cup that included some minor details on the look and feel. Its very much taking NASCAR as a model. And, if the sponsorships work out, at least some money for those of us who would like to win some of the prizes in order to fund some of our development. The layout of the event area put the viewing public very close to the launch pads. There were several comments along of the lines of “AST isn't going to let you do that”. John Carmack said it best, “You want to do something that's exciting. AST doesn't like exciting.”

Now we're hearing from Dr. Pascal Lee (Mars Institute) but this is mostly a science based discussion. He suggested that the Moon is scientifically explorable according to the Antarctica model which made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I don't think he ment the politico/economic aspect so I'm not going to pick that nit.

Now we're hearing from Joe Landon about Yuri's Night. Joe is with the Space Generation Foundation. Heh… Yuri's Night is about bringing other communities and the space communities together. Specifically the art, music, dance and fashion oriented communities. No wonder ours didn't do very well, none of us had any artistic or musical talent, rhythm or style! ;-)

Joe Horsting (Intrepid Digital Design Studios) is talking about MMORPGs. Nothing new here for those who know what MMORPGs are. The absolutely funniest thing just happened. Joe was making assertions about costs to deploy a game and John Carmack asked for details and then disagreed with his cost estimates (they were really talking about two vastly different market segments). But Joe had no idea who he was talking to. He asked, slightly incredulously, “So what part of the gaming industry do you work in?” The room immediately fell completely apart. The biggest “lol” I've seen in a while. You have to feel sorry for the guy, but that was just damn funny.

Life Lesson #23: Be careful what you say because you never know who is in the audience.

Now we're hearing form Andre Bormanis who is the lead writer for “Enterprise”. I missed most of this because I was chatting with Carmack and Horsting in the back of the room about the gaming/internet entertainment industry.

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Jeff Krukin is moderating this session on Settlement and talking specifically talking about the Space Settlement Project. His main point is that 'exploration', 'science', 'projects', or 'programs' don't apply to the public on a personal nature whereas settlement does since its about individuals going some place else to live.

IMHO, settlement is still to esoteric for most of the public who, in Jeff's words, “don't get it”. You have to make it still more personal because very very few people are willing, able, or motivated to live some place else.

Now Steve Wolfe is up and is talking about how Jeff talked about how space is important to other people where as he wants to talk about why we are as motivated as we are so that we can communicate it better.

“You are unique in our global population because you have awakened to a particular vision and that is something you should cherish and hold as an extraordinary gift”.

The challenge is to keep ourselves motivated by discovering what our core motivating principles are. Now we're doing a mental exercise to remember what our 'emotional trigger' was for getting into this business. He calls that the “evolutionary impulse” causing you to take action.

Now the crowd is relating their 'moments'.

A little to 'touchy feely' for me but the room seems to be enjoying the mental “way back machine”.

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John Powell is giving an update on JP Aerospace. Last time John gave a really interesting update so let's see what they been doing for the past 6 months.

Two major things: yes, they have done Dark Station missions, first manned mission is 18 months from now.

They do intend on going for the Bigelow Prize. I think this is the first announcement of intent to go for that particular prize.

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Henry Vanderbilt is currently stalling while a “surprise guest” shows up. Lance Bass is here! He's been talking to kids about World Space Week and about Burt and the Xprize.

He's talking about the international aspect of space and the youth component (very much in line with the Space Generation group that does Yuri's Night).

I suspect we're going to get alot of this since we are near Hollywood.

Question: when are you going into space?

Answer: whenever I can. Something is in the works to make it pretty soon.

Question: from a marketing standpoint, what should we be doing to market to the segment that N'Sync was targeted at?

Answer: Make it cool and don't talk to the kids, talk with the kids. Its a conversation, not a lecture.

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The luncheon panel was mostly business and investment related. The good quotes came from Walt Anderson:

“European space companies are good to work with because they don't have such a huge majority of their revenue form defense related contracts” (rough quote).

“Now is the time to be more institutional” (i.e. societal/legal/business institutions, not governmental

The fund that Golden Appel is part of is fully invested.

There was a short discussion on 'space branding' and a “space chamber of commerce” but nothing conclusive. Andrew Olson says that the Colony Fund is getting significant interest and is taking investments.

Now we're getting an update from John Carmack. Armadillo always has the best videos.

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Jim Muncy is up to give us a legislative update (specifically on HR 3752). Right now he's covering the breakthroughs over the past year. But you can hear the “but” that's coming up. Jim is currently making the ubiquitous “politics is sausage” comment. “We have reached a crisis point in the legislation where passing no legislation at all ends up being a very good thing”. He's now giving a bit of history about the first meetings with Dana Rohrabacher, FAA's ruling changes, etc.

One thing that I didn't know about was that the Transportation department was asked to excercize its power to give the entire launch industry the maximum amount of relief from EPA require environmental assessments (essenntially a FONSI).

Now he's reviewing the whole Pioneer Rocketplane (now just Rocketplane, LTD) fiasco…

The language provided by the Senate back to the House for 3752 was “an abomination”. Apparently they said “we don't want people dying like they did in the shuttle”. So, not knowing what they were doing, they added language that said the

“safety of crew and passengers” in the pre-amble of the bill, on equal footing as the “safety of the general public (i.e. third party)”.

Where we are is some very helpful senators have agreed to hold up the bill from being passed by unanimous consent. XCOR, who has been working so hard on this from the beginning, has said they asked for it to be stoppped. They didn't say that if you pass this we will die. They said, if you do this we will do it but just not in this country.

The senate is not going to do anything this week.

They're going to still try and get something done during the lame duck session. So Jim is asking everyone to contact their Senators and say “the house did a really good thing but the Senate language is wrong and that they should work with the industry on the right language”.

So call today if you can.

hehe.. “the poison meat is in the Senate sausage machine so we're going to stop, clean out the machine, and start over”.

Hmmm… apparently there was more than just one poison pill but Jim couldn't show the new language to anyone so we don't know what the others were. Apparently the Senate just wrote something in a vacuum.

Call or fax your Senate: The Xprize has just been won. This is a great opportunity. Unfortunately the Congress is about to make really bad or no legislation that could kill this industry before it starts. You should contact your party leadership in the Senate Commerce Committee and say that they should work with the industry.“

Jim is going to write something up so we can send something more detailed before COB today.

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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….

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John Carmack is giving an update on Armadillo. Mostly its about finding launch sites and deciding where to go after the Xprize. He's mostly focusing on the Xprize Cup and keeping things below the FAA license limits so he can find reasonable launch sites…

Interesting question: what is your business goal?

Tourism at the $100k price point. He's fine with 500 people at $100K. But its other stuff too like a rocket sled ride for a couple grand (i.e the opposite of the Zero-G)

Next question: as you go forward and do develop something people can ride on, do you have a plan for turning Armadillo into a standard boring old service company with things like QA, maintenance, etc?

Carmack: No, we have no plans for turning Armadillo into a boring company.

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I'm on vacation but not in Mojave so I had to watch it on Fox this morning. That had to be the smoothest flight so far. Now that the Prize has been won the media and public will start looking at the next steps. I suspect that with Branson's funding and other licensees (Fox mentioned 'others' this morning) that Scaled will be doing several more flight tests and probably has already started work on the next vehicle in the series.

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