Dana finished early, so an unscheduled speaker, Bruce Pittman, is giving a talk on the NASA Ames Space Portal, which was established by Pete Worden (Ames center director) to set up a way for private industry to more easily interface with NASA.

“If space is so great, why aren’t we using it more”? You’d think we’d be smarter than we are after fifty years. Held a series of workshops to figure out what’s missing to bring the full potential of commercial space to fruition. Time scales too long on research, space not routine enough, no clear demand model. Need to find more robust customer base. Also need to find business cases that will close in order to raise money.

They decided that this is actually a pretty good time to get into the space business. Helping support COTS (which is not a contract–it’s a public/private partnership via a Space Act Agreement). We should recognize that this is a very difficult thing for NASA, because they don’t like to relinquish control, and if they’re not doing as good a job of it as they can, be happy that they’re doing it at all, and hope that they get better at it. Pointing out the difficulties of NASA’s “visiting vehicle” policy, and need to make this easier, as well as making it easier to do things on the station itself.

They’re trying to learn from history, based on NACA (I think that Charles Miller will be talking about this as well, after the break). NACA formed to help regain the lead from the Europeans in aviation early in the century. We need a NACA-like entity for space, resurrecting the good things that NACA did right up until NASA was formed that created the aviation industry. In keeping with the National Space Act, but NASA has done a poor job of implementation.

Goal of the portal is to help NASA meet these legislative obligations, by helping build customer base for space services, and providing a “friendly front door” for the agency.

Working with NASA on COTS, looking for ideas for COTS follow ons. Working on Virtual Reality and simspace (working with Second Life) to see how to apply to the real space world. Commercial workshop results available on the web.

[Stuff coming too fast to capture–recommend going to Ames Space Portal web site for more information.]