Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Whatever the merits of the case, Walt would seem to have a novel defense for his tax avoidance:

He was going to use the money to change the world. To fight for arms control and human rights. To promote family planning and space exploration. He was going to give the money away, starting next year…

… Anderson was one of the driving forces behind MirCorp, which sought to privatize Russia’s decrepit Mir space station and arranged for an American financier to take an excursion in space. MirCorp’s ambitions were dashed with the station’s demise.

But Anderson has remained passionate about space. “I want to build my own space station since we lost the Mir,” he said. “I want to have a moon base.”

It also has some interesting quotes from Jeff Manber and Bob Werb.

I believe him. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t view that as a good reason to stash funds overseas.

It would be nice if we could get some philanthropy going in this area from some less flaky sources. One of the reasons that we’ve made so little progress is that the people with the money aren’t interested in space, and the people interested in space haven’t had the money, and when on the rare occasion you get someone with both, there’s some other problem. I hope that the Paul Allens and Jeff Bezos’ of the world will start to change that.

NASA Watch has links to this and related stories.

Robert Zimmerman has a disturbing (though not surprising, at least to me) piece at Space Daily, which reports that NASA did no analysis in support of its original decision to cancel the planned Shuttle flight to repair Hubble, and ignored more viable options in favor of its misguided robotic gambit:

NASA historian Steven Dick gave a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, in which he described the process by which that decision was made and revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed.

Dick had interviewed all of the NASA officials who had been involved in the decision to cancel the shuttle mission to the Hubble, a discussion that came to a head in December 2003 when those officials had been working on NASA’s fiscal year 2005 budget.

According to Dick’s interviews, risk was the major factor in the discussion, but the officials decided a formal risk analysis was unnecessary. Instead, Dick noted, “The decision was made (by O’Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk.”

In other words, O’Keefe canceled the Hubble mission solely on his gut feeling of the situation. So, the only way NASA can provide the House Science Committee’s requested copy of that risk analysis from December 2003 is to recreate it after the fact.

I had always suspected this. I think that Sean O’Keefe was good for the agency, in terms of starting to get the books straightened out (a task that’s by no means complete), and starting to restructure it for the end of the Cold War, but I also think that he lost his nerve after having to stand on the tarmac and tell those families that their loved ones weren’t coming home two years ago. He simply didn’t want to have to risk doing that again. And that’s fine, but if so, he was no longer the man for the job, and perhaps didn’t step down soon enough, because it clearly adversely influenced the decision he made a year later. Spaceflight is inherently risky, and if we can’t accept that, as either a NASA administrator or a nation, then we have no business doing it.

And as Zimmerman concludes, that’s really what’s so disturbing about that decision, in terms of its potential implications for the future:

For NASA and the American space program, this increasingly untenable position is beginning to have a serious political cost. By refusing to reconsider their decision and reinstate the shuttle servicing mission to Hubble, NASA is undercutting its ability to persuade Congress to give it money to build spacecraft to fly humans back to the moon.

As Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., noted during those same science committee hearings, “If we’re unwilling to take the risks to go to Hubble, then what does that say about (our willingness to mount) a moon and eventual Mars mission?”

Or as Boehlert remarked, “In a budget as excruciatingly tight as this one, NASA probably should not get as much as the president has proposed.”

Unless President George W. Bush appoints a new NASA administrator with the courage to reverse the Hubble decision, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to persuade Congress – or anyone else, for that matter – that NASA has the wherewithal to handle his ambitious space initiative.

But it goes beyond the risk aversion. If the story is true, the changing stories and lack of data after the fact bring back memories of the Goldin years, in which some said that NASA stood for “Never A Straight Answer.” That was something that O’Keefe was supposed to fix, not contribute to, and it may take a further investigation with some mea culpas and credible recommendations for avoiding this sort of thing in the future, in order for NASA to gain the confidence needed, from both Congress and the public that still wonders why it’s about to lose one of the few NASA programs with genuine widespread support.

A group has been formed to save Star Trek, the latest version of which, Enterprise, has just been canceled. Here’s what I found interesting, though:

We are in the commercial space flight industry and would like to testify that at least one out of two of all the actual entrepreneurs involved in this industry has been inspired by Star Trek; and we are not only good at watching TV sci-fi , we are also good at writing checks, big checks. The people airing this kind of TV have a responsibility; inspiration. Star Trek has inspired us, and particularly Enterprise, with its superb theme song that tells so much about our struggle to move space travel forward and closer to the public, this inspiration is so self evident, that Virgin Galactic has ordered a 5-sub orbital ship fleet from Scaled Composites, a 100 million dollar investment, and the first one being built is going to be christened

Here’s some more on Esther Dyson’s overpriced space entrepreneur conference:

“Nobody’s holding a space conference, so I decided to do one,” she said in an interview. “It’s not that there aren’t space conferences, but nothing as tacky and commercial as we want to be.”

So it wasn’t just hype on the web site. She really is clueless about what’s been going on in this field. This is both disappointing, coming from Freeman’s (for whom my respect is boundless) daughter, and annoying. A lot of us have been in the trenches trying to make this stuff happen for years, even decades. We’ve overpaid our dues, and now we get to deal with an Esther-come-lately.

And she can’t even be bothered to focus on the subject at hand:

The conference, which costs $1,492 to attend, is also aimed at taking on a topic of more immediate potential – a concept called “air taxi.” A growing number of entrepreneurs are looking at using relatively small, inexpensive airplanes to revive and expand the short-hop commuter industry, ferrying people to and from small airports.

That’s an interesting subject, but it has little to do with space technology, and all it will due is further dilute the utility of this one-day conference. I said I’d like to go if I could afford the time and the money, but now I’m thinking that even if I did, I’d get little out of it.

I’m not sure what to say at this point. Walt Anderson, bankroller of several emerging space companies (some of which I’ve worked for and with), has been arrested for tax evasion:

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said the allegations mark the largest criminal tax case against an individual.

Anderson, 51, earned millions by dealing in telecommunications companies after the AT&T breakup and became a global figure about five years ago when he embarked on a mission to try to rescue the ailing Russian Mir space station.

I hadn’t talked to him since last June, at the first SS1 flight into space, in Mojave.

Without speaking to the merits of the case, it’s safe to say that this will put a severe crimp into the capability of the first dotcom millionaire who was putting his money where his mouth was to continue to support space entrepreneurs.

[Via NASA Watch]

[Update on Tuesday morning]

Here’s more from the New York Times:

The Justice Department said that Mr. Anderson was involved in starting long-distance telecommunications businesses as the industry was being deregulated, and that he realized in the early 1990’s that the merger of his first successful company, Mid-Atlantic Telecom, with another company would result in substantial taxable earnings.

To avoid paying those taxes, the department said, he formed an offshore corporation called Gold & Appel Transfer in the British Virgin Islands and hired a trust company to serve as Gold & Appel’s registered agent and sold director. Gold & Appel was owned by another British Virgin Islands company previously formed by Mr. Anderson, the department said.

Mr. Anderson structured his dealings so that he had complete, albeit hidden, control of the corporations, prosecutors said. They said he further obscured his holdings by forming another offshore corporation in Panama, transferring Gold & Appel shares to that entity and having the shares sent to a mail drop in Amsterdam that he had rented under an alias.

The indictment said Mr. Anderson concealed his illegal dealings from his accountants, repeatedly tried to thwart I.R.S. inquiries, sometimes used the alias “Mark Roth” and falsely proclaimed himself a citizen of the Dominican Republic when he opened accounts with a New Jersey bank.

Gold & Appel (prounounced “Golden Apple”) was the investment source for many of his investments, including Rotary Rocket, Mircorp, and others. I don’t know, but suspect that it also provided the seed funding and endowment for the FINDS fund.

Well, can’t have that money funding projects that could get us off the planet. Much better to sink it in that vast black hole known as the federal budget, of course.

[Update at 9:45 PM EST]

Here’s more (though for some unaccountable reason the NYT reporter consistently misspells Gold & Appel as “Gold and Appeal”):

Mr. Anderson has long attracted a certain level of public attention, especially when he tried to arrange a rescue of the Mir space station five years ago. He frequently flew in a private jet and made deals involving millions of dollars. At conferences on space travel he often spoke of his hatred of government…

…Gary Hudson of Redwood City, Calif., said that Mr. Anderson invested $30 million in his Rotary Rocket, the primary backing for a private rocket launching and recovery firm that ultimately failed.

“One condition of his investment was that we could not take any government money,” Mr. Hudson said in a telephone interview on Monday.

I guess that occasionally it’s possible to be a little too libertarian.

[Update at 11:20 AM EST]

Here’s one more, the longest piece on the story yet, from the WaPo.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.

Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.