Michael doesn't blog very often, but when he does, he nails it. This President may be killing Constellation for all the wrong reasons. In fact, I doubt that this President truly realizes what doors he has opened here.

But, as the Vulcan proverb says, "Only Nixon could go to China."

Only a Democrat President, with the glitz and glamour of JFK, could possibly have gotten this far in killing the hagiography of JFK's space program. No Republican would have a chance.

NASA doesn't work as a method of getting large numbers of humans (and cargo) into space reliably, repeatably, and cheaply. It can't, because it wasn't designed to. To quote Rand Simberg, "in response to the Soviet socialist state enterprise for space, we created one of our own." And, like every socialist state enterprise in the history of mankind, NASA is crippled from inception.

Obama has proposed sweeping away all of the cruft that has accreted around NASA's human space flight establishment and replacing it with private enterprise. After all, if a government employee needs to fly from Washington to San Francisco they don't fly on a government airplane. (Well, unless they're Nancy Pelosi.) They fly on Delta Air Lines, with a discount for volume purchases. Why should low Earth orbit be any different?

As a lifelong space enthusiast and long-time space investor, I'm absolutely thrilled. Because, as I never cease pointing out to people... I don't support "the space program." I support the space industry. And you have to kill the former to allow room for the new industry to breathe.

In the distant past of 2004, I testified in front of the Aldridge Commission. You can read my testimony here, or the commission's final report here. The Obama Administration's proposals are much closer to these free-market recommendations than anything the Bush Administration ever considered implementing.

This has to get past Congress, where there are a lot of entrenched special interests getting ready to fight for their pork barrel spending. And we could still screw it all up by insisting that NASA regulate the "safety" of its successors, when that's properly the job of the Department of Transportation (specifically, AST). This isn't a done deal. But, if Obama is successful, we'll be able to mark 2010 as the year that we finally quit subsidizing a massive socialist Ministry of Space, and launched a multi-billion dollar American-led space industry.

Which, in the middle of all the bad economic news around us, sounds very very good indeed.

I suspect that Dr. Loewy and I agree a lot more than we disagree, but I'm glad to have had the chance to have my position printed.

Click on the image below for a high-resolution PDF, or scroll to the bottom to read my original text:

The version above, edited for length but without changing my meaning, is 137 words. In case you're interested, my original submission (exactly 150 words!) before editing was:

NASA shouldn't go back to the Moon. But individual Americans should... as explorers and entrepreneurs and colonists.

In the 1960s, America won the space race with the Soviets... but we went to the Moon too early, before the technology was cost-effective, and we haven't been back in forty years. It's too expensive.

This time, we should find ways to explore, exploit, and colonize the Moon cost-effectively. That means a national space program designed to create and support a new space industry... not another "flags and footprints" mission with no real-world impact. We can build a new economic sector in which America leads the world -- and which supports tens of thousands of high-quality jobs here on Earth.

It's not NASA's job to send astronauts back to the Moon. NASA's job should be to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send astronauts to the Moon.

And I couldn't acknowledge it within my 150-word limit, but that last sentence is modified from Rand Simberg; he deserves any credit for it. Check out his blog, and take the time to read his article on "A Space Program for the Rest of Us" at The New Atlantis.

Most venture forums concentrate on a particular geography (Atlanta, the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic, whatever).

This one is a little different... it's focusing on a particular industry sector. In our case, aerospace. So, even though it's going to be in Los Angeles, we're interested in aerospace entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world.

And we have a pretty liberal definition of "aerospace":

• Information-Based Applications (e.g., satellite telecommunications, GPS-based navigation, weather observation, asset tracking, remote sensing, imaging, environmental monitoring)

• Transportation Systems and Services (e.g., orbital and sub-orbital vehicles, satellites, personal aircraft, very light jets, UAVs, space tourism and air taxi operators, spaceports)
• Technology Commercialization (e.g., SBIR/STTR applicants, university and federal lab tech transfer, dual use technologies, business plan and prize competition teams)
• Aerospace-Related Technologies (e.g., clean tech, entertainment, media, retail, medical devices, telemedicine, life sciences)

I have faith in the entrepreneurial community... that's broad enough that I know the twenty presentation slots will fill up fast!

It's going to be September 26, with a reception the night before. You can see more details here: http://www.spaceangelsnetwork.com/ventureforums.php.

PS — I occasionally get asked "What's a 'space angel'?" Really no different from any other angel investor (Wikipedia definition here), but with a sector focus on aerospace investments. After making deals individually for years, we launched Space Angels Network about a month ago to add some deal screening and deal sharing capabilities. You can read about the founding members here.

So, finally, we're able to talk about the Air Force contract and the Lynx spaceplane.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, what is a video worth?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a-l1tb1rPg&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01&hl=en]

And, before you ask... yes, I am 6'4" and, yes, I fit in the cockpit. I've checked.

Press release here; good articles here and here.

Why methane? Because you can find it or make it using space-based resources. In particular, you can use the Martian atmosphere and water ice from the Martian poles to make both methane and LOX (liquid oxygen). Living off the land in space is the only way to really establish a presence off this planet. Imagine if Lewis and Clark had had to leave St. Louis carrying all the food they were going to eat on their three-year voyage! Impossible.

XCOR is one of the most exciting "New Space" companies that are trying to rekindle the dreams of living and working in space... dreams which NASA has tried to bury under layers of bureaucracy, risk aversion, and Congressional pork. I was the first outside investor in XCOR in 2000, and remain a member of its board of directors. Check out their Website; lots of good news, and the company is always hiring!

Yes, I go every year. No, I don't wear costumes. (Although I appreciate some of those who do. [Some. Spandex is a privilege, not a right.]) No, I don't stand in line for autographs by aging semi-celebrities. No, I don't own any comic books.

But it's inarguable that Dragon*Con probably increases the average IQ of Atlanta by ten points when it comes to town. And if you take 40,000 intelligent people, probably 1% of them are going to want to discuss things like space travel (real, not Star Trek), science, and skepticism. That's where the Space and Science Track comes in. This year, we had experts talking about antimatter-based cancer therapy, Generation IV nuclear reactors, Bose-Einstein condensates, Mars exploration, and the radiation environment for satellites. (Oh, and the Mythbusters team.) And me.

I gave five presentations on four topics: What's in the labs at Georgia Tech, the hydrogen myth, space access, and XCOR. For people who have found this page looking for copies of my slides, most of them are posted here.

My final presentation, Halfway to Anywhere, was in the last time slot of the last day... and 25 people showed up, and stayed an extra half hour asking questions until I finally ran them off! (The title is from a quote by Robert Heinlein: "Reach low orbit, and you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system.") This is an ongoing experiment for me in breaking the tyranny of PowerPoint (although these days, I'm using Keynote, which is just astonishingly better). I started creating this presentation after attending a seminar by Edward Tufte. If he comes to your town, you should make a point of attending one of these... he's wonderful.

Anyhow, I've evolved an hour-long presentation which consists of 146 slides... only one of which has any words on it. (The Heinlein quote above.) The remainder are just images... one after the other after the other in rapid succession. You have to pay attention since you can't just read the text. And you can't check email on your BlackBerry because you'd miss three slides. It works wonderfully well, and I'm proud of it.

However, of those 140-odd images, probably 100 of them are violating somebody's copyright somewhere. I don't have the time or the money to chase down publication rights, or to replace everything with Creative Commons imagery (which isn't as complete as you'd like yet). So that Keynote stack isn't being posted. You'll have to catch me in person for that.

But -- to bring this long and rambling blog posting to something work-related -- it's an interesting example of what you can do with presentations if you get away from the standard text templates and force yourself into something more expressive. I guarantee that any entrepreneur pitching me with 146 slides and no text would have my attention!

I have no idea what happened. It looks like a horrible industrial accident. (What it wasn't was a "rocket blowing up," or even a "rocket engine blowing up"... there wasn't a rocket engine under test. Just some components.) There's a investigation underway, and we'll eventually know if it's a design problem, or operational error, or just Murphy's Law.

I don't recall ever meeting any of Thursday's victims, but I know a lot of people who knew them casually, and a few people who knew them well. And I know a lot of people just like them... engineers and technicians who have gotten tired of pretty pictures and promises from NASA, and who decided to go turn a wrench on a piece of hardware that will get us one step closer to the stars. Developing a new transportation system is always dangerous. Look back at the casualty rates in the early days of airplanes, or automobiles... or, for that matter, ocean-going sailing ships.

Priorities are to grieve for the dead, pray for the injured, and figure out what went wrong so it won't happen again. I commend to you the statement of the Personal Spaceflight Federation, linked here.

What else should we do?

It's currently on the main page at the National Space Society; for when it scrolls off, I will reproduce the essential elements here:

Please send contributions to:

Scaled Family Support Fund
c/o Scaled Composites, 1624 Flight Line, Mojave, CA. 93501.
Acct # 04157-66832
Wire transfer ABA Routing #1220-0066-1

Please make checks payable to the account number or to the name of the fund.

My wire transfer will be there tomorrow. Will yours?

__
Please excuse brevity. Sent from handheld.

In the southeast US we need more meaningful dialog about what is happening... Sometimes, it's hard to find out about who's doing what.

So -- my challenge to the local VC community - which I dearly respect: start blogging.

Here's my public challenge. I'd like to see the following at least start a blog and post one meaningful article related to venture capital and what they're interested in:

* Stephen Fleming, Chief Commercialization Officer, GT Venture Labs
* [four other names deleted]

This is not that "meaningful article." Soon, I hope.

In the meantime... I find myself at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas (ISDC) and I'm fascinated by how much the "new space" industry has changed over the years. I've always said that the four most dangerous words in the English language are "It's different this time"... but, maybe, this time, it's true!

Here are my slides from the Space Venture Finance Symposium, but they were just a crutch; the real value of the session was Esther Dyson managing a brisk Q&A session with the audience. I'm being struck by parallels and differences between the space angel/VC market and the southeastern angel/VC market.

Both are out of the mainstream for most investors... an unusual market sector for space, an unusual geography for the Southeast. That can make it hard to get a meeting with investors who only want to invest in semiconductor deals, or deals in Silicon Valley.

For those who have found this blog from the Southeast who know nothing about the private space industry... a lot of rocket companies have wandered in the wilderness for decades now, and most have starved and died. The new generation is doing better. (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in several, including XCOR and Constellation Services.) What's the difference, and what could the Southeast learn from them?

If you factor out the companies backed by billionaires (Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc.), you find the thriving startups have found ways to eat the elephant one bite at a time. Instead of looking for $20 million in venture capital, they're finding ways to cobble together multiple small sources of cash -- SBIR grants, state tax credits, small amounts of angel money, and selling of engineering/consulting services -- to keep the doors open and push their technology forward. At least one of these companies has now turned a profit, at least a couple are having acquisition discussions with larger players, and half a dozen look like they're going to survive and thrive.

I like deals that can demonstrate competence by achieving intermediate milestones. It makes it a lot easier to raise the next round of equity -- or maybe even avoid the need for a "next round of equity" altogether.