Up till the little hours guzzling Amber Bock, and just crawled out of bed and checked out. I'll be driving back to LA this afternoon.

Jeff Foust has a summary of some of yesterday's panels. Overall, though, no big news at this conference--it was sort of last year, part II. I think that the biggest change is that more people are attending, and more important people. There was a reporter from The Robb Report here to do a story, and Esther Dyson showed up and seemed to have a good time, so I suspect that she'll be continuing to get more involved.

More thoughts perhaps this evening, after a drive across the desert.

[Update in the evening]

Well, I'm back in Manhattan Beach, but I don't have any more thoughts. An interesting weekend, but a tiring one.

[Monday morning update]

Jeff Foust has written up a general conference report in today's issue of The Space Review, so I didn't have to.

...where on the roller coaster are space entrepreneurs—collectively known in recent years as alt.space or, more recently, NewSpace—today? The rate of ascent, one can argue, has slowed from a couple of years ago, with no manned commercial suborbital launches since SpaceShipOne’s prize-winning flights over 18 months ago. On the other hand, there are no obvious signs of a downturn: interest in suborbital space tourism remains high, and several companies are making progress on their vehicles. Instead, what emerged from the Space Access ’06 conference in Phoenix—the annual gathering of many of the major companies in the industry—was evidence of gradual, incremental progress, with neither major breakthroughs nor significant setbacks.

Thanks, Jeff!

So who is this Amber Bock you were guzzling, and will she be posting here in the future?