Just a few hours after the end of it, Alan Boyle (who was too burned out to have dinner with me, Jeff Foust, and Clark Lindsey this evening) has a good wrap up of the event.

Off to Holloman in the morning for a pre-Cup press activity.

[Update a little after 10 Mountain time]

Alan also has a report on the hurdles ahead for the Spaceport America.

Gotta love Boyle's "All it would take is that 'first Netscape event, such as a successful SpaceX public offering, [Diamandis] said."

It wouldn't be a NewSpaceFest without the ritual invocation of "Gonna be just like the dot-com glory days, and the PC explosion, a-and Moore's Law, because really, folks, putting payloads 200 miles up at 7 kps is just like twiddling bits!"

Monte, you can ask Jeff Greason about how hard it was to get the Pentium working. It would probably be a lot easier to go 7 KPS with $50 billion in private investment. If Elon can do it with $100M in seed money...

The leap isn't that this is technically harder than microprocessors. It's been 50 years since the first suborbital and orbital ships were lifted. The cost for suborbital launches with Space Ship One was 97% lower or more than X-15 depending on how you count. It can get another 97% lower with higher utilization and longer and more intense mass production runs.

The main sticking point is that like the pre-Apple II personal computer revolution or pre-Mosaic, non-commercial Internet, we haven't discovered the high demand, killer app that drives the innovation yet. If we have to wait for $500 flights to trigger mass demand for suborbital, it's technically possible, but still decades away from being realized via a dribble of private resources. If we have to wait for Elon to self fund his own Mars missions, all I can say is that I hope he sells high after his IPO.

A few words:

With the PC revolution, the internet revolution, and all the others I know of - first came the technical capability, then came the business case.

People did not sit down and figure out how Excel would change the world - they built computers really cheaply, and the world figured out Excel.

Same with the internet - they made computers communicate, made web browsers, then someone else came along and said, "Hey, I bet I could do something with this."

So, how does this apply to space access? Well, first off, note that in both cases what happened is something became easier/cheaper. Particularly, the existing item (both computers and networks existed long before they went big) went to the mass market and dramatically increased the average Joe's capabilities.

The whole point of cheaper space access is to make it available to everyone, so that is true by definition (although I think the price point will be even lower than people are now quoting, personally). The real question is: "Will we dramatically increase the average Joe's capabilities?"

Reasonable people can differ on their answer to that, but I believe the answer is a resounding "Yes!"

Sam, we've both spent lots of time with IBM, and I helped launch both the 80486 and Pentium, so I don't need to ask Jeff to be well aware of the scale of investment in IT in both mainframe and PC worlds. The crucial difference is in the pace at which, after proof of principle, subsequent steps pay for themselves. That kicked in less than a decade after the first digital computer. It happened 40+ years ago for satellites taking advantage of orbital position (and, not incidentally, benefiting from Moore's Law improvements in function/kg and therefore function/$). It has yet to happen for any other activity in space.

As for the "killer app," I submit that every one of them -- for mainframes as well as for PCs -- had an equivalent or close analog, one which had already been a business for a long time, in the non-computer world. Commercial mainframes and their apps got traction quickly because businesses already kept accounts, built spreadsheets, created and stored documents, etc. by the millions... and it's hardly accidental that the term "killer app" was first applied to Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Computer gaming had plenty of precedents in pinball arcades and tabletop games. The Internet combines library, mail-order catalog, bulletin board, conference call, etc.... Even a comment thread in a forum like this is a faster-interacting version of the letter column in a special-interest magazine. (BTW, as for the "pre-Mosaic, non-commercial Internet," Lexis and CompuServe were both getting my money for something more than 25 years ago; that they didn't use TCP/IP at the time is trivial in this context.)

What they all had in common was that people were already doing a lot of X (and one way or another making a lot of money from it); computers and killer apps offered a faster/cheaper/niftier way to do both.

The nearest to that anyone has come for human spaceflight -- something that *might* conceivably pay enough to fund subsequent steps -- is space tourism (proof of principle a few jaunts to ISS) and/or barnstorming (Virgin Galactic first in line). And as you say, that in and of itself has a hard row to hoe; its closest analogs (Antarctic cruises, submarine rides, Zero Gravity flights) all use technologies and infrastructure that were developed for (and paid for by) other, much larger uses long before they appeared.

If you can think of another activity people *already* do a lot of that will become significantly faster/cheaper/niftier on an ROI timescale to drive us through to CATS, I'd love to hear about it. NB, that doesn't include all the space resources that come into reach *when* we have CATS; I'm talking about something with the potential to pay for itself, and fund the R&D for the next steps, on the way to CATS. [Insert mandatory "sex in space" joke]

For all the talk of Columbus and the Wright brothers, "Netscape events" and "Moore's Law for space," space really is different -- in economics as well as physics -- from anything we've ever done before.

I have to agree with Monte here.

The microcomputer world as a fundamentally bootstrapping event.

The 4004 was first used as the controller for red lights.

The 8080 was an OEM design done as a cost reduction exercise for the Datapoint 3300 computer.

The Altair leveraged the 8080 and other low cost TTL components (Altair was about to go out of business because of the loss of Apollo era aerospace contracts), along with the work of two software weenies who were supported by their parents, living in a motel room in Albuquerque who wrote the first BASIC Interpreter for the Altair (now known as Bill Gates and Paul Allen).

The IBM PC did not come out until the microcomputer industry was already at a half billion dollars a year sales. The 80286 did not come out until Intel had completely amortized the development costs of the 8088/8086.

People who make the comparisons between microcomputers, the dot com industry and so forth simply don't understand that fundamentally the space business is capital intensive while the computer and dot com world's grew out of a bootstrap market.

The only bootstrapping that has been done in commercial space are the companies that leverage being a government contractor to amortize their labor and indirect costs to do something else. However, the very act of becoming a government contractor under the FAR's limits the ability to be entreprenurial.

first came the technical capability, then came the business case

I'd love to agree, David. But as you may gather from my reply to Sam, I think the process is more complicated -- for other technologies as well as for IT -- than that.

Yes, the proof-of-principle steps -- the Zuse and Atanasoff and Turing prototypes, the ENIACs and EDVACs and Whirlwinds -- came before the business case. Like big rocketry, they were funded by government for high-priority, "money's no object" needs.

But after that, in IT, progress quickly became self-funding. Mainframes were coining money for IBM and the "dwarfs" from the early 1950s on, minis for DEC and others from the 1960s on, precisely because they smoothly assumed the roles of (and were cheaper and faster than) millions of already existing ledger clerks and file clerks and adding-machine crankers and typists and...

And though we like to dwell on how "surprisingly" PC uses expanded beyond desktop productivity apps, it was precisely the success of those apps that drove early Apple and IBM PC sales and brought in the cloners. So your "they built computers really cheaply, and the world figured out Excel" is simply historically wrong. Without Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 -- and the pre-existing demand for their functions from home businesses, small businesses, and corporate users tired of waiting for time on the mainframe or mini -- you wouldn't have seen the fast ramp-up in sales that brought a high initial price point ($10-15K in today's money) down so quickly. Without me and others paying through the nose for CompuServe and Lexis in 1980, without corporate purchases driving down LAN and WAN hardware costs through the 1980s, you wouldn't have seen the "magical" explosion of the Internet with Mosaic and Netscape.

Believe me, as both a space junkie since 1957 and a computer junkie since first talking to a PDP-6 in 1967, I'd be really happy to think the growth of space technology simply must start matching the pace and spread of IT Real Soon Now. But it ain't gonna happen -- any more than it has matched the pace and spread of the first 50 years of aviation.

Space isn't really very much like aviation yet, in deep and inescapable economic ways -- and it's even less like PCs. Show me two mechanics in Dayton, Ohio funding a Spaceship One, instead of Paul Allen. Show me a Jobs and Wozniak developing the transistor and CRT and disk drive on their own, instead of Bell Labs and RCA/Sylvania and IBM. Then it'll be time to talk about how similar they all are.

Well, for every analogy there are parts that work and parts that don't:

IBM + Intel = Big Aerospace. Neither directly caused the PC revolution, they merely rode the wave profitably.

Apple/Altair = XCOR / Armadillo. They were created by hobbyists for hobbyists, without a whole lot of thought for profit.

Yes, the little guys use the research done by the big guys - but they bring it to the masses. IBM certainly did not want to provide smaller and cheaper mainframes! They were forced to go into the PC because 1) they were smart, and 2) they could see the writting on the wall.

As for what space will do for the average Joe, I believe that the "space vacation" aspects will allow space to be opened - similar to how the "spreadsheet" aspects of the PC opened computers. But in the end, the PCs became common and usage exploded for applications not forseen by the original creators. No one ever thought there would be a computer on every desk. (Or almost a trillion transistors in every office!)

I'm not saying that this is guaranteed. But I do think it has a good chance.

The other things that empower the average Joe about space:
* Fast travel anywhere on the planet
* Limitless power from the sun (if you live in space this is obvious - perhaps we can beam power to Earth efficiently as well)
* Limitless materials from the NEAs (again, really helps if you live in space - perhaps some materials like platinum can be sold on Earth as well)

But really, when you ask what the "killer ap" is going to be, you are going about it the wrong way. You are trying to explore a design space. Your explore a design space by creating an enabling technology, and then use capitalism to explore the design space.

You can't do that by edict, and you certainly can't do that in your head!

David

What you don't understand is the scale factor. When Altair built the first 8080-S-100 system it probably cost about $25k in DDT&E costs with little production tooling needed to turn out systems. The production could then ramp up as necessary.

Vector Graphic Inc, the company that I worked for started out in the house of founder Bob & Lore Harp and was almost immediately profitable, which is the definition of bootstrapping. Same thing with Apple.

This is not possible with a suborbital tourist carrying system, or an orbital launch vehicle. Space is a capital intensive enterprise, requiring tens to hundreds of millions of dollars before the first revenue is generated.

The first people to make it in this alt.space biz are true believers like Elon and others with expendable capital and the faith that they will be able to make it to revenue before their money runs out.

It boggles the mind that space advocates continue to attempt to link alt.space to the microcomputer revolution when the economic models are not even slightly the same. Now after the first well capitalized teams get to profitability then we will start seeing venture capital come in but until that happens it is just wishful thinking to think that people in a garage are going to do these types of systems.

"I'm like the man who singlehandedly built the rocket and went to the moon. What was his name? Apollo Creed?"

for every analogy there are parts that work and parts that don't

Dave, I have no problem with anyone saying: "Technologies can start out expensive, driven by narrow needs of a few users, and progress through a 'virtuous circle' of increasing demand and declining cost, attracting more investment as returns grow, to become cheap and ubiquitous, transforming the way we live. I look forward to that happening for access to space."

That describes many, many technologies since the discovery of meteoric iron and copper... and makes no claim about the rate of innovation, the rate of cost reduction, or the rate of spread from few users to many.

But when people talk about Netscape moments and the PC explosion and "Moore's law for space," they are consciously or unconsciously smuggling in a whole lot of claims that are not based on real similarities between the technologies and their economic contexts. That's where optimism about space -- which I share -- turns into wishful thinking, which is a lasting and serious obstacle to real progress.

Dennis Ray Wingo wrote:

It boggles the mind that space advocates continue to attempt to link alt.space to the microcomputer revolution when the economic models are not even slightly the same. Now after the first well capitalized teams get to profitability then we will start seeing venture capital come in but until that happens it is just wishful thinking to think that people in a garage are going to do these types of systems.

I agree with you solidly, Dennis. Keep in mind that the first microcomputers depended on someone to provide cheap ICs (for CPUs and other things) and other electronic components. There was a lot of infrastructure in place. Further, the customers were there. Early on, it was the hobbyists. But businesses had been using computers for some time. So it wasn't a stretch to expect businesses to start buying them for the desktop or other places.

In comparison, we have little infrastructure and few customers in space. Anything having to do with space is expensive. This is a harsh environment for small startups, like breathing vacuum. Once you have large numbers of people and robots doing things in space, then you'll have an environment for the little guy. Everyone will need a little better manipulator or life support system.