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The Ansari X Prize foundation is holding several Ebay auctions. There is a press release at the X Prize Web site. Also, the auction listing for Ebay seller xprizefoundation is available <a href=“http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewSellersOtherItems&userid=xprizefoundation&completed=0&sort=3&since=-1”>here.

Isn't capitalism grand?

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Yea, I know, I have a beefjerky.com banner ad. So what? This is still funny regardless of what you think of Mr. Nemitz's legal claims.

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It seems the hold that Inhofe had on HR 3752, or “The Commercial Space Launch Ammendments Act of 2004” has been released. There's no text to examine but it appears they went with the language that's based on how much of your flight profile is rocket powered. Alan Boyle at MSNBC was the first with the story.

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As some of you have noted my RSS feeds (both incoming and outgoing) have been flaky lately. I've also found a much lower cost hosting service so I'll be moving and upgrading soon. So please pardon the dust…

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Found via Transterrestrial Musings & Space Today: bq. The X Prize Foundation, which administers the $10-million Ansari X Prize, is planning a press conference next week where one or more competing teams may announce plans to conduct flights to win the prize. The press conference is scheduled for Tuesday morning, July 27, in Santa Monica, California, according to a media advisory issued Wednesday.

So far it looks like the announcements will be from the Scaled Composites and da Vinci teams.

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Overall this Return To The Moon has been the best so far. Attendance was good and varied. There were no really horrible logistical snafus. I personally provided the wireless access point but that's something I do regularly anyway. Those little linksys NAT/AP-in-a-box systems are really useful for ad hoc conference setups.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the lunar community is where the Space Access community was several years ago. There are a few companies working on projects but few have gotten to the point where boring old business issues like insurance and regulatory compliance are the overriding topic. But it is a thousand times better than the 2000 conference which was my first.

We are still in the midst of the great Slideware Wars. The proliferation of 3d modeling software has allowed just about everyone to produce pretty pictures of their particular moon base/lunar transport idea. Its almost as if our manhood is being judged by how photo-realistic our 3d models are. ;-) Don't get me wrong, I like eye candy just as much as the next space nut. But we need to make sure we're moving beyond that.

I also sensed a certain “great divide” going on between what Rick calls the “alt.space” crowd and the traditional NASA oriented view of going back to the moon. Several of the companies that were there are actively involved in drafting responses to the CEV requests while others are barely cognizant of what NASA is planning on doing. At points it was obvious we were talking past each other. I'm sure I was even guilty of it at one point.

One thing I did notice that I'd like to call some rather direct attention to is an idea that the right marketing campaign can “change the minds” of the public about space and the moon specifically. Yes, it is possible to mold public opinion through ad campaigns. But it is extremely difficult and really only works when it comes to simple things such as a broader brand awareness (Nike does sports stuff instead of just shoes). During the Dot Com Bubble (do we capitalize that now?) there were numerous attempts to build products that were predicated on changing the customer's behavior. None of them worked. What does work is creating value for a customer from their point of view and then slowly educating them through direct interaction with the product over time. But it requires the customer to have already made a decision to buy.

I really wish the entire conference had heard the break out session that I was in. Tom Matula's presentation on basic marketing would have helped immensely. My jaw dropped to the floor when he began to discuss Bass diffusion curves. Who knows, maybe someone we will be able to do 5 Forces modeling of lunar startups at the upcoming SFF conference! I would hope that next year everyone's presentation includes at least some discussion of who they think their customer and product are and how you structure your development to achieve some short term cash flow. Even if the answer is just “NASA”. At least we'll know someone thought about the question.

I think as the political environment becomes clearer and we get over the hump of this election that the Centennial Challenges program coupled with other efforts will make next years RTTM an extremely interesting conference to attend. I'll be there!

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I just received an email for OrbDev updating their case on soliciting a declaratory judgement from the courts on their claim of ownership on the asteroid Eros. Whatever your feelings about owning space property are, this is setting one of the first legal precedents in space property in the American court system.

The text is below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CARSON CITY, NEVADA

The first legal case in Space Property Law was advanced today, 20 July, 2004, into U.S. Federal Appeals Court. Gregory Nemitz of Carson City, Nevada filed an appeal brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California. The brief requests that the lower Court's Order to Dismiss be overturned.

On November 3, 2003 Nemitz filed a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in U.S. District Court in Reno, Nevada. The complaint charged the court to resolve the question, “Does the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 preclude private ownership of an asteroid and/or property on celestial bodies, or does it not?”

In March of 2000, Nemitz published a claim of ownership to Asteroid 433, Eros, commencing the “Eros Project for Space Property Law;? see: www.erosproject.com. On February 12, 2001, NASA permanently landed its NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on Nemitz's asteroid. Nemitz then sent NASA an invoice for parking and storage fees of $20 for the next century's rents. NASA refused to pay the invoice, citing that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 precludes private ownership of an asteroid.

Nemitz then sent a formal Notice to the United States Department of State that NASA had exceeded its authority and had denied Nemitz of his legal Rights. The U.S. State Department's Official Determination in the matter stated that, "In the view of the Department, private ownership of an asteroid is precluded by Article II of the [Outer Space Treaty of 1967].” Nemitz then filed the Complaint for Declaratory Judgement in the District Court to determine the matter of Rights v. Treaty.

Nemitz states the importance of this issue, “There will be no commercial activities to harvest the vast and valuable resources in Space without official respect for private property rights.” Nemitz's long-held viewpoint was recently confirmed by the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, when in June, 2004 it released its recommendations which included:

“Because of this treaty regime, the legal status of a hypothetical private company engaged in making products from space resources is uncertain. Potentially, this uncertainty could strangle a nascent spacebased industry in its cradle; no company will invest millions of dollars in developing a product to which their legal claim is uncertain. The issue of private property rights in space is a complex one involving national and international legal issues. However, it is imperative that these issues be recognized and addressed at an early stage in the implementation of the vision, otherwise there will be little significant private sector activity associated with the development of space resources, one of our key goals.”

In Nemitz's Appeal Brief, he succinctly states:

“The United States, in its defense of the U.S. Department of State's and NASA's Official Determinations in this matter of Rights v. Treaty, espouses a position that endorses and is in complete accord with the first plank of the Communist Manifesto.

"1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”

Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, Marx

It is unimaginable that when the Outer Space Treaty was being negotiated with the Soviet Union in the United Nations, during 1966-67 at the height of the Cold War, that the American delegation intended for our American society's fundamental order of private property rights should be completely withheld from the People who will conduct their business and their lives in outer space. The Department of State's and NASA's interpretations are a completely abhorrent antithesis to the American way of life. At the time of those Official Determinations and even now, Russia and the CIS (former Soviet Union) have reformed their fundamental societal order to accommodate private property rights, yet the U.S. Dept. of Justice today defends or obfuscates these ludicrous and stifling Official Determinations of the U.S. Dept of State and NASA, as if the United States of America was dominated by a Communist regime.“

Nemitz's complete Appeal Brief is available for public review at: www.erosproject.com/appeal/apindex.html.

The Eros Project for Space Property Law is primarily sponsored by Beefjerky.com, www.beefjerky.com. Additional support is provided by the Space Age Publishing Company, www.spaceagepub.com.

The Eros Project's legal fund accepts the public's donations in any amount on its website.

Contact:

Gregory Nemitz

gnemitz@orbdev.com

(775) 721-2708

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Space Frontier Foundation is attempting to educate the public on the idea that the vision for space should be about settlement instead of “exploration”. So far few details but here's the link:http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/SpaceSettlement/

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I picked up a copy of New Moon Rising: The Making Of America's New Space Vision And The Remaking Of Nasa after hearing Frank Sietzen's talk on the book. I'm back home now and read the book on the way back. Frank signed my copy after his presentation but after reading it I know I'll need to get Keith's autograph as well since his style and focus comes through in a major way at various points in the book.

The book chronicles the processes around the evolution of the new vision for space that has been presented over the past year. But it isn't presented as a chronological history. Instead it follows themes and particular actors (O'Keefe to a great degree) that make it difficult at times to understand which events coincide with others. I've personally been paying close attention to this history so I know some of the context. If you don't know that context there are sections that will be very confusing. It delves deeply into NASA from the late Clinton administration straight through to post CAIB. At times it almost feels as though it were two books: the first half being a history of NASA and its reactions to Columbia and the other being a history of the Bush administrations efforts to reform an agency.

Often books that have multiple authors feel disjointed as prose shifts from one style to another. The book suffers from that to a certain degree but not to the point of distraction. It is fairly to easy to determine who wrote particular sections. Frank adds color and description. Keith's sections have the same feel as NASA Watch itself: fact filled paragraphs listed in sections roughly associated with a theme but which often don't relate to each other directly. One almost expects to find permalinks and posting dates next to each individual paragraph in each subheading. But overall the flow works and it doesn't distract from the narrative and the analysis. A graphical timeline in an appendix would have helped immensely.

I did find it rather amazing at how recent some of the text was. The section that mentioned the Space Exploration Alliance's Moon-Mars Blitz sounded almost as if it was about to discuss how the actual event went even though it happened only 6 days ago. Book printing must be an insanely fast process these days. The book did seem to be a bit rushed since there were some obvious typos and printing errors that a final read by someone could have caught. But that's just the old typesetter in me trying to get out of its cold dark cage.

I was fairly disappointed in the fact that the book seemed to focus almost exclusively on NASA. Burt Rutan received one paragraph. The sections of the Aldridge Commission report on changing the way NASA approaches contracting seems to have been misunderstood. Indeed, the entire analysis of the Commission's report seems to have been done without actually consulting anyone on the commission and to have been compiled completely from publicly available information. The Space Exploration Alliance received almost a page but there seemed to be no reporting on anything any of the member organizations were saying through SEA. As I neared the end of the book I found myself actively skipping whole pages attempting to find some mention of the more wide ranging policy suggestions that the Commission had made. Sure, I'm biased since I consider myself part of the “alt.space” crowd, but the laser-like focus on NASA and nothing but NASA was disappointing.

What will be interesting is to see whether or not this book dispels some of the “Bush just did this for a publicity stunt. He doesn't really care about space” nonsense that seems to come from “left” field. I'm sure some will accuse Frank and Keith of carrying water for the Administration but the level of verifiable detail will make it obvious that those accusations are marginal at best. One never gets a hint of “infatuation” that being around power can create.

I would recommend the book, but don't expect it to be as comprehensive as the dust jacket makes it sound. I would hope that both Frank and Keith take the opportunity to round out their analysis and coverage by looking at how the entire space industry, “alt” or otherwise, had input into and is being affected by the new vision.

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Rand Simberg is live blogging the RTTM presentations.

So far there are a few here talking about markets and customers but so far its been a lot of “my rocket/base/science is better than your rocket/base/science”.

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