private spaceflight

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Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

Ansari's high name recognition further added to the publicity being generated around the private space industry. As each orbital client flew, it gave them and SA global free publicity through millions of media impressions. At the same time, it reignited the waning spaceflight interest of the general public. Prior to Tito's flight, shuttle and Soyuz flights had become routine. Polls showed that most people didn't even know the iss existed. But Tito's controversial flight brought space and NASA back to center stage, commanding an unprecedented number of hits on NASA'S Web site. Although most people had been introduced to the concept of private spaceflight, it didn't quite seem real until the fourth orbital client and first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, started publishing her online blogs.

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Substitute "spaceflight" for "flight," and the seventy-year gap between Lindbergh and Diamandis melted away. Lindberg's thoughts might have been his own. There was a remarkable similarity in the way both men strategized to turn a dream into reality. No small wonder that Diamandis took the book to heart- it had shown him the way to accelerate private spaceflight development. He would create the first suborbital spaceflight prize. The concept of using prizes to jump-start innovation was hardly new. From advancing aviation to the precise detection of time, prizes have played a major part in advancing radical technology throughout history. In 1714 Britain's Longitudinal Act created cash prizes for the first marine chronometer, later won by Englishman John Harrison in 1735.

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Diamandis would name it the "x PRIZE" - the X serving as a placeholder for the name of the benefactor who would give the needed prize money. He also settled on $to million as the prize amount, a nice round number that is also represented by "X" in Roman numerals. Now he was ready to recreate the same golden age of aviation in spaceflight through a private spaceflight competition. Diamandis wasted no time telling Maryniak of his wild idea. "I was the first guy to tell Peter he was crazy," Maryniak recalled. But Maryniak soon recanted, knowing full well that this might be the solution to bringing down the wall that was stopping all progress." The wall, quite simply, was the "premise that only governments could do it [spaceflight].

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

In response, the Obama administration outlined plans to spend more money to support development of human-rated spacecraft in the private sector, and to salvage parts of the Constellation program—an evolution of Constellation’s heavy booster, now dubbed the Space Launch System (SLS), and the Orion capsule. To many observers, this represented a welcome change in priorities. NASA would continue to build—albeit very slowly—its own space capsule and large rocket, which would carry a human crew to rendezvous with an asteroid in the 2020s. NASA would additionally direct funding to private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX and Boeing to deliver astronauts and supplies to the ISS. Artist’s concept of the cancelled Asteroid Redirect Mission. Image credit: NASA There was one major bug in the ointment, however. The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), as it came to be known, while a valid demonstration of technology and engineering, was not popular.

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I thought about how the Apollo spacecraft had been replaced by the shuttle, ending our efforts for human exploration beyond Earth orbit. I reflected on what alternative paths might have been followed, and what the results might have been. I balanced these notions with positive thoughts about the rise of private spaceflight and China’s nascent efforts. One thing became increasingly clear as I pondered the future: Whatever the next few decades held in store, the results were unlikely to resemble the first space age, and that was a good thing. Since the late 1970s, many space advocates have pined for another “Kennedy moment,” when an American president or foreign leader (probably Russian) would stride to a podium and announce a daring, large-scale government program to accomplish aggressive new goals in space, such as JFK did when he announced the Apollo lunar landing program in 1961.

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The study continued, noting that: “NASA’s allocation, on average, was estimated to be approximately 24 percent of the national budget (the NASA allocation in 2007 was approximately 0.58 percent of the budget).”10 At its height in the mid-1960s, NASA’s budget was almost 5 percent of federal dollars; it is now about a tenth of that. At the same time, the agency is running far more complex and wide-ranging programs than they were in the 1960s, including weather and Earth-science satellites, robotic planetary and deep-space exploration programs, and human-staffed efforts such as the ISS. The agency is also investing in private spaceflight. So NASA is, in fact, doing far more with much less. In 1969 dollars, the Apollo program was estimated to have cost about $20 to $25 billion (or roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars). Regardless of the total federal budget, that sounds like a lot of money. And to many people, it was too much to spend for what they thought of as just 840 pounds of moon rocks and a few thousand pictures.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

He was an eccentric, obsessed with ultra-strong, lightweight materials made of woven carbon fibers, a pioneer when many in the industry weren’t ready to trust new composites over tried-and-true metals. Microsoft’s Paul Allen, seeking a space investment of his own, had been won over by Rutan’s effort to capture the private spaceflight prize and backed him with a $20 million investment. Unlike other space engineers, Rutan usually kept one foot in the atmosphere. SpaceShipOne is a space plane. This is a term of art for a vehicle that can reach space through rocket propulsion but also has wings to generate lift, allowing it to fly in the atmosphere like an airplane.

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It was 2004, and the space age that Americans had been promised for decades finally seemed within grasp. When Virgin Galactic was unveiled, Musk’s SpaceX was still just a few years old, barely more than a group of enthusiasts. They were still planning a test flight of their first rocket, the Falcon 1. Virgin looked destined to be the first into the private spaceflight market, with a proven design, a sales plan in action, and a passionate backer making headlines. Is that why Bezos, whose space company predated them both, chose to unveil his company’s plans and bold investment in 2005? Given the lack of warning and apparent lack of follow-up, the question is interesting.

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Moreover, he wasn’t done raising expectations. Musk unveiled his plans for a new rocket, dubbed the Falcon 5 because it would fly on five Merlin engines, not just one. That rocket, Musk said, would be ready two years later, in 2005. The next year would turn out to mark a major turning point in the history of private spaceflight, a milestone that would benefit both Musk and his competitors. The only problem? Musk and SpaceX had nothing to do with it. 7 Never a Straight Answer The whole culture of program management in the US aerospace and defense industry is today enormously biased toward excessive conservatism.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Peter, in introducing everyone, noted that Byron had now flown more than three hundred orbits, logging 468 hours—nearly twenty days—in space. Colette Bevis, seated nearby, had headed marketing for Society Expeditions, a company trying to break into commercial space. Across the table was Gary Hudson, a college dropout who had taught launch vehicle design at Stanford, and was an entrepreneur who had been pushing for private spaceflight development since 1969, when he was nineteen. He just wanted to build and ride in a reusable spaceship, preferably one that did both vertical takeoffs and vertical landings. David Wine had known Peter since the early ISU days and was an investor in International Microspace. Wine had been in talks with Burt Rutan about moving Scaled Composites from the Mojave Desert to Montrose.

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He needed a rocket with more power, and he had just the idea. 28 Power Struggles After the June 21 flight, Burt started questioning for the first time whether his homemade craft could pull off the XPRIZE feat. SpaceShipOne had barely reached its goal of space, and pilot Mike Melvill had endured the flight of his life. To the public, it appeared Scaled Composites had hit a home run, hosting an estimated 25,000 people for the first private spaceflight and certifying the world’s first commercial astronaut. But privately, Burt was worried that the flight had exposed weaknesses in his spacecraft. During the ascent, Mike had ended up in airspace over the populated city of Palmdale—way off the two-mile-by-two-mile flight path approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.

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Witt, seeing the rolls in the sky and on the screens, said, “Uh oh, uh oh. He’s in a roll.” His fellow commentator said, “It does not appear to be a scripted maneuver.” Silence fell over the crowd. Richard Branson looked over at Sally Melvill. Her anguished expression said it all. Branson dreamed of private spaceflight, but knew this was pushing the limits. Paul Allen watched, feeling himself age twenty years in a few stressful moments. Dick Rutan was talking with Miles O’Brien live on CNN when the rolls began. Dick said to O’Brien, “This is probably not how Mike planned it.” Dick looked up at the sky and thought that there was a real chance that Mike would not recover.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Now the source of dozens of million-dollar prizes in a wide range of fields, the organization took its original inspiration from the Orteig Prize won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for the first successful transatlantic flight. The X Prizes began in the mid-1990s, when the aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis announced a competition that would spur innovation in the then nonexistent private-spaceflight industry. Ten million dollars would be awarded to any group that could carry three people beyond the earth’s atmosphere, approximately sixty-two miles above the surface of the planet. (To prove that the solution was a durable one, the prizewinner had to complete the mission successfully twice in two weeks.)

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The foundation prides itself on the way it develops its new prizes, drawing on a peer network of diverse interests to “ensure the input of a variety of perspectives.” The network of advisers that created the Lunar X Prize included Internet entrepreneurs, technology historians, NASA officials, MIT aeronautics professors, and pioneers in the private-spaceflight industry. Each prize emerges out of an intense, layered process: researching the field and defining worthy problems, and then crystallizing the best set of objectives for the prize that will capture the attention of would-be winners as well as the wider public. The X Prize founders may have been inspired by the Orteig Prize and the Spirit of St.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

In addition to the dozens of interviews I conducted for this book, my research depended on many texts, a few of which merit specific mention: Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and Julian Guthrie’s How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight. While I was on leave from the Post, I was fortunate to find another home—the Wilson International Center for Scholars—which provided a much-needed space to write and reflect. I’m thankful for the support of Jane Harman and Robert Litwak, who made the experience possible. Rafe Sagalyn, my agent, was a relentless and enthusiastic advocate for the project.

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Upset with what he saw: Andrew Pollack, “A Maverick’s Agenda: Nonstop Global Flight and Tourists in Space,” New York Times, December 9, 2003. Rutan acknowledged: Adams, “The New Right Stuff.” “See what you’re up against”: Julian Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight (New York: Penguin, 2016), 339. “Yeah,” Rutan concurred: Paul Allen, Idea Man (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011). Left unsaid: Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship, 341. During Binnie’s first: Ibid., 229. Allen would see the prize!: Ibid., 235. But suddenly Siebold: Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship, 360–361.

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He went on to thank NASA for its support, saying it helped the company save about a year in development time. This was indeed a tremendous milestone—and huge news, a Henry Ford moment: Jeff Bezos was building a rocket engine. Garver immediately sensed a public-relations opportunity for NASA and the White House. Since they had backed Blue with $25.7 million in contracts, and were supporting the private space industry, she wanted to shout this success to the rooftops. Let all those doubters in Congress, in industry, even in NASA’s own leadership, know that these companies, with help from the government, could succeed. “Your note about NASA’s assistance saving you a year of development time is especially welcome,” Garver wrote to Meyerson.

Come Fly With Us: NASA's Payload Specialist Program by Melvin Croft, John Youskauskas, Don Thomas

active measures, active transport: walking or cycling, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

Developmental contracts for commercial crew transport were awarded to the Boeing Company and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for more capable vehicles, but neither would fly before 2018, after arduous funding issues and technical delays. However, there is great promise for scientists and engineers to be able to conduct space-based microgravity research in a coming age of suborbital—and even orbital—private spaceflight. Two aerospace companies—Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin—are developing two radically different designs for passenger-carrying spacecraft intended to (initially) launch fare-paying thrill seekers on brief suborbital flights above one hundred kilometers, which is the generally accepted definition of “space.”

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See media pressure suits, 91, 93–94, 363, 365 principal investigators, 16–17, 27, 61, 76, 106, 128, 153, 265 Prinz, Dianne, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128–29, 136 probability risk analysis (PRA), 43 problems: on Atlantis, 211, 287; on Challenger, 95–96, 97–98, 99, 114–17, 132–33, 177, 340–41, 356–57, 359; with clothing, 151; on Columbia, 325–26, 329–30, 372, 379–82; with communications, 173–74; as “contingencies,” 45; on Discovery, 185–86, 232–33, 250, 379; payload specialists and, 131–32; in private spaceflight, 387; with shuttle program, 359–60; on Spacelab, 74, 130–31, 148 protein crystal growth experiment, 248, 328, 330 provocative tests, 69–71, 72 PSSG (Payload Specialist Selection Group), 62, 64 public affairs officers (PAOs), 6, 380 public relations, 30–31, 40, 353, 376 pump, 294–95 purine nucleoside phosphorylase, 328 Puz, Craig A., 195, 372 Quistgaard, Erik, 63 racks, 68, 140, 144, 148–49 RAHF (Research Animal Holding Facility), 112, 114 RAM (Research and Applications Modules), 11 Ramadan, 264, 272 Ramon, Ilan, 53, 378–79, 379, 382–83 RAN (Royal Australian Navy), 87, 88 Rapp, Rita, 328 RAUs (remote acquisition units), 68–69 RCA, 293, 321, 324, 336 RCA Advanced Technology Lab, 309, 310 RCA Americom, 309–10 RCA Astro Electronics division, 305, 308–9 Reagan, Ronald, 42, 86, 180, 203, 253, 347–48, 350–51, 352, 357 Reichhardt, Tony, 116 remote acquisition units (RAUs), 68–69 remote manipulator system, 85, 95 repairs, 74–76, 84, 152, 235, 250–51, 322 reporters.

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In the Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Paul Haney In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Walter Cunningham To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers Chris Gainor Foreword by Alfred Worden Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin Foreword by Homer Hickam Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft Jay Gallentine Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 Edited by Colin Burgess Foreword by Richard F. Gordon Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom Foreword by Charles D. Walker The X-15 Rocket Plane: Flying the First Wings into Space Michelle Evans Foreword by Joe H. Engle Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011 Rick Houston Foreword by Jerry Ross Bold They Rise David Hitt and Heather R.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Some, though, went further. They argued that the purpose of private spaceflight was not merely to displace government but to undermine its raison d’être. Landing a man on the Moon had come to be seen—as Kennedy had intended it to be seen—as the ultimate symbol of what a government could do to achieve a stated national goal: hence the double-edged importance of “If we can put a man on the Moon . . .”, stressing simultaneously what can be done and what the country chooses not to do. But what if there were no such “we”? Private spaceflight was important to some on the libertarian right, I learned, specifically because it would remove that singular governmental source of prestige, disproving the claim that there were achievements which, by their nature, were for governments alone: natural monopolies of prestige.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

If that happens in thirty, forty years, I’ll be too old to run TPF, but at least I’d have the money to make it personally happen.” Seager had signed on as a scientific advisor with a new venture, Planetary Resources, Inc., which would publicly debut two months after our conversation. The company was cofounded by two influential entrepreneurs of the emerging private spaceflight industry, Eric Anderson and Peter Diamandis; among its investors were Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, and the billionaire space tourist and software developer Charles Simonyi. Other than Seager, its advisors included the Hollywood filmmaker and deep-ocean explorer James Cameron and a former U.S.

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Roger D. Blandford et al., New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2010). This report is available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12951. Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). Charles Elachi et al., A Road Map for the Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems (Pasadena: NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1996). This report is available online at http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/exnps/toc.html. James Kasting, Wesley Traub et al., Terrestrial Planet Finder—Coronagraph (TPF-C) Flight Baseline Mission Concept (Pasadena: NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2009).

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

“twice as tall”: Irene Mona Klotz, “Rutan Meets His Rocket Heroes,” BBC.com, October 25, 2004. “a blot upon fair Nature’s face”: Edmund J. Carpenter, “Mojave, the Phantom City,” Godey’s Magazine 131 (July 1895). Lethal pit vipers slithered among the creosote bushes: Julian Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). “driving out the tramps like rabbits”: “Man Hunt in Hobo Haunts on Desert,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1908. dry his grapes and sell them as raisins: Rollo, Burt Rutan. “a creative battering ram”: Andy Meisler, “Slipping the Bonds of Earth and Sky,” New York Times, August 3, 1995.

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Fernholz, Tim. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018). Glenn, John, and Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1999). Guthrie, Julian. How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). Kemp, Kenny. Destination Space: Making Science Fiction a Reality (London: Virgin Books, 2007). Koller, Jeffrey W. The Eden Peace Witness: A Collection of Personal Accounts (Wichita, KS: Jebeko Publishing, 2004). Mailer, Norman. Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

In the words of one SpaceX press release, this feat is like balancing “a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.”19 In December 2015, the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket successfully completed an upright landing on solid ground after putting its cargo in orbit. Blue Origin—which is Bezos’s private spaceflight company—also landed the reusable booster stage of its New Shepard rocket back on Earth after sending it to space. Since then, both companies have refurbished and reused numerous recovered rocket stages, sending them back out to space like certified pre-owned cars. What was once a wild experiment is on its way to becoming routine.

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Jacey Fortin and Karen Zraick, “First All-Female Spacewalk Canceled Because NASA Doesn’t Have Two Suits That Fit,” New York Times, March 25, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html. 8. For an excellent book that tells this story, see Julian Guthrie, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight (New York: Penguin 2016). 9. “SpaceX Signs 20-Year Lease for Historic Launch Pad 39A,” NBC News, April 15, 2014, www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-signs-20-year-lease-historic-launch-pad-39a-n81226. 10. Amy Thompson, “NASA’s Supersize Space Launch System Might Be Doomed,” Wired, March 14, 2019, www.wired.com/story/nasas-super-sized-space-launch-system-might-be-doomed. 11.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

• XCOR Aerospace rocketeers build reusable rocket-powered vehicles, propulsion systems, advanced nonflammable composites, and rocket piston pumps. XCOR is building the Lynx, a piloted, two-seat, fully reusable liquid rocket–powered suborbital vehicle that takes off and lands horizontally. The Lynx family of vehicles is geared toward research and scientific missions, private spaceflight, and microsatellite launch. An objective of the group is to fly Lynx commercial vehicles to 100-plus kilometers in altitude up to four times per day. Global Space Economy When you look at the global space economy, a striking dollar number stems from a yearly read of the Space Foundation’s appraisal of the situation.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Why we’re still waiting for the space elevator For decades, engineers and science-fiction writers have dreamed of lifts capable of carrying things into orbit from the Earth’s surface. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian scientist, suggested the idea in 1895, inspired by the Eiffel Tower. And in 1979 Arthur C. Clarke wrote an entire novel, The Fountains of Paradise, about the construction of such a space elevator. Thanks to SpaceX and other private spaceflight companies, rocket launches have fallen in price in recent years. Each launch of the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in operation today, costs around $90m. But whisking satellites, space probes and even people into orbit on a giant elevator might be cheaper, more reliable and more civilised than using giant fireworks – if one could be built.

The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

I also am committed to helping as many people as possible have their own orbital perspective experience. To accomplish this, I am working with a powerful team of visionaries devoted to the democratization of space. Our first bold initiative is the creation of Star Harbor Space Training Academy, which will provide all the training necessary for upcoming private spaceflight participants and the crews that will fly them.3 Our hope is also to provide everyone with a powerful opportunity to experience the orbital perspective, even if they never leave the ground. Human operations in low Earth orbit are no longer the sole domain of large government agencies, and with a new and exciting commercial human spaceflight industry blossoming, it’s a very exciting time in history.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Alternatively, if you’d like a faster opinion on likely funeral dates just visit deathclock.com the condensed idea Living forever timeline 2100 Human beings start migration to far-flung galaxies 2150 Typical humanoid life span is 584 2200 Children heavily taxed to reduce overcrowding on planet XB-1987 2250 Having children is made illegal on Earth 2255 Children kept illegally 2275 Average life span now over 800 2300 Transhumanism declared a giant mistake 36 Alt.Space & space tourism “Alt.Space” is a term that hasn’t quite taken off yet. It’s a phrase that is just starting to emerge, used to describe private spaceflight, especially that provided by a new breed of companies intent on offering low-cost access to space through the creation of novel technologies or business models. As such, Alt.Space companies are competing directly with NASA and other national or international government space organizations. Who, just a few decades ago, would have thought that billionaires would one day be in a race to invade space?

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

One might 1 day hear the following conversation: “Are you going skiing in the Rockies this winter?” “No I thought I would take a flight into outer space to see the Aurora Borealis, instead.” Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson have worked in tandem to spur the space tourism industry. They were strong advocates to launch what was first called the Private Spaceflight Federation. This then quickly evolved to become the Commercial Spaceflight Federation that now includes a collection of spaceplane developers, spaceport operators and a variety of aerospace organizations . XCOR, with a variation on the concept of taking a spaceplane ride into “outer space” is offering a flight on their Lynx Mark 11 that only goes up about 40 miles (64 km) for only some $100,000.

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Most recently Musk has announced plans to launch in 2018 this largest vehicle to Mars with a “Red Dragon” capsule on board. The objective is to demonstrate the ability to eventually send astronauts to Mars. As Musk has said with serious intent but tongue in cheek: “I want to die on Mars, but not on landing.” This remarkably rapid progress by the private space industry is impressive, but it reopens the tough to answer question: “Why cannot NASA make such remarkable progress at a similar rate and such low cost efficiency?” In fact the latest question that surfaced is, why does NASA need to spend billions to design and build the new Space Launcher System (SLS) if SpaceX’s new heavy lift launcher can go to Mars?

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Or to use Cowen’s favored metaphor, if we have plucked most of the low-hanging fruit that the industrial revolution made possible to reach, there might still be a ladder that someone could invent that would make the higher branches suddenly easier to reach, and for all we know, that ladder might be being extended even now. In which case, we will look back on our present decadence as simply a lull—a period when innovation slowed temporarily before self-driving cars and CRISPR and nanotech and private spaceflight sent it surging forward once again. That possibility will be considered in more detail later. But the lull is still the multigenerational reality right now, and human history offers no reassurance that it will necessarily end. As Gordon and Cowen note, it’s the great surge of innovation in recent Western history that’s the historical anomaly, not the disappointing years since our great leap moonward.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

The microwave oven was a success not just because of the radical leap from military communications to cooking, but also because lots of researchers from Amana, Litton, and their Japanese competitors worked on the design and improved the technology of the magnetron. Sometimes this coordination happens spontaneously. But we can also think of things that help it along. Prizes, like the eighteenth-century Longitude Prize or the twenty-first-century Ansari-X Prize for private spaceflight, can help crowd investment into a neglected area. No doubt, part of the reason the technology press hypes new technologies, like the Internet of Things or solar energy, is not only because it makes for more exciting stories, but because it also has a functional role of drawing attention to up-and-coming areas and encouraging coordinated investment.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

They had sacrificed and suffered setbacks, but they had never given up. The Alpha Girls had created their own paths, had made their own history. And as Magdalena knew, they’d only just begun. AUTHOR’S NOTE The idea for Alpha Girls has roots in my last book, How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight. As I traveled around the country talking to groups of engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists, I kept asking myself one question: Where are all the women? In crowds big and small, there would be only a handful of women. I began to research the many fields where women are underrepresented, and I soon homed in on venture capital as an industry that is not well known but has enormous influence.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Nevertheless, Kardashev's effort to create a classification system for advanced spacefaring civilization was an important step. So I have adapted his general schema to what I consider more a useful metric for measuring civilizational progress as presented here. CHAPTER 1. BREAKING THE BONDS OF EARTH 1. Julian Guthrie. How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight (New York: Penguin, 2016). 2. Robert Zubrin with Richard Wagner, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet, and Why We Must, 2nd ed. (New York: Free Press, 2011). 3. Wikipedia, s.v. “Mars Gravity Biosatellite,” last modified October 26, 2018, 14:23, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite; “Mars Society Launches Translife Mission,” Spaceref, August 30, 2001, http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?

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It should incentivize the development of additional systems, including rovers, habitats, life support, power units, space suits, and so on, the same way. Approached in this way, we can have our first permanent bases established and operating on both the moon and Mars within a decade, for a small fraction of NASA's current budget. We will also have a vibrant private space industry, driving down the cost and advancing the technology of launch vehicles, spacecraft, propulsion, and every other system needed for space exploration and development with all the ferocious creativity that free enterprise can bring to bear. With that, the doorway to the universe will be flung wide open.

Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton

double helix, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, informal economy, it's over 9,000, new economy, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan

Despite the collapse of the Caribbean mass tourism industry, each flight was always full. Ever stricter industrial and bioethic regulations in the developed nations made the relocation of certain specialist core activities to the Windies an attractive proposition for a lot of companies and researchers. The most prominent was of course the private spaceflight operators, even though they were among the smallest financial contributors to the economy of the Caribbean islands. “I can’t see any spaceplanes,” Annabelle complained as they were on their approach to St. John’s. She was pressed up against the cabin window. Jeff looked over her shoulder.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

And Scaled Composites is not the only designer and builder of commercial spacecraft in Mojave. I also walk past hangars for Masten Space Systems and XCOR Aerospace. XCOR’s CEO Jeff Greason (whom I’ll meet later) was part of the 2009 Augustine Commission that reviewed the workings of the American space program. Their report made the case for stronger partnerships between NASA and private spaceflight operators. Greason remarked that their findings departed from previous presidential commissions on the future of US space exploration not by recommending anything radically different but because ‘some people actually paid attention this time.’ Part of the reason, no doubt, is the Space Shuttle’s 2011 retirement date.

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

This would be a first, and it would make SpaceX the front-runner to become the contractor NASA hires to get people and cargo up and down to the International Space Station. Even if today’s launch is successful, Dragon will have to fly many more resupply missions, over a period of years, before it can be considered safe for astronauts. I’ve never been a believer in privatized spaceflight—getting to space as cheaply as possible with an emphasis on catering to paying customers only serves to rob spaceflight of the things I love most about it. But I started to notice how many of my space friends—people I would have thought would be NASA-only snobs like me—were getting excited about the SpaceX launch, were posting updates about it online and making plans to come out for the launch.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

For example, I was once part of a small group dinner with Jeff Bezos, who was an early investor in Behance. I remember being struck by just how many questions he was asking the group about our work and opinions on new design and tech trends among other topics. I recall leaving the dinner and realizing that the conversation had not even touched upon Blue Origin, his private spaceflight company, or the Washington Post, the newspaper that he owns. The man is building rockets to explore the final frontier and controls one of the country’s largest media organizations, but was more interested in asking us about start-ups. It dawned on me that perhaps Amazon’s persistent growth and Jeff’s seemingly infallible grasp of so many different industries was the result of his curiosity overpowering others’ attention for him.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low by Richard Jurek

additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, it's over 9,000, John Conway, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stewart Brand, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

In the Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Paul Haney In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Walter Cunningham To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers Chris Gainor Foreword by Alfred Worden Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin Foreword by Homer Hickam Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft Jay Gallentine Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 Edited by Colin Burgess Foreword by Richard F. Gordon Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom Foreword by Charles D. Walker The X-15 Rocket Plane: Flying the First Wings into Space Michelle Evans Foreword by Joe H. Engle Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011 Rick Houston Foreword by Jerry Ross Bold They Rise David Hitt and Heather R.

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston, J. Milt Heflin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, crewed spaceflight, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pneumatic tube, private spaceflight, Skype

In the Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Paul Haney In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969 Francis French and Colin Burgess Foreword by Walter Cunningham To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers Chris Gainor Foreword by Alfred Worden Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story David Hitt, Owen Garriott, and Joe Kerwin Foreword by Homer Hickam Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft Jay Gallentine Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969–1975 Edited by Colin Burgess Foreword by Richard F. Gordon Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom Foreword by Charles D. Walker The X-15 Rocket Plane: Flying the First Wings into Space Michelle Evans Foreword by Joe H. Engle Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011 Rick Houston Foreword by Jerry Ross Bold They Rise David Hitt and Heather R.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

” Spirit animal: Eagle * * * Peter Diamandis Dr. Peter H. Diamandis (TW: @PeterDiamandis, diamandis.com) has been named one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune magazine. Peter is founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, best known for its $10 million Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight. Today the XPRIZE leads the world in designing and operating large-scale global competitions to solve market failures. He is also the co-founder (along with J. Craig Venter and Bob Hariri) and vice chairman of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI); and the co-founder and executive chairman of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to prospect near-Earth asteroids for precious materials (seriously).

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Today marks the anniversary of that event, and Blumenthal couldn’t be happier. Alone in his condo, he watches a Falcon Heavy booster rocket alight somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Its successful landing not only makes a manned mission to Mars highly likely, but also continues an unblemished three-year safety record for SpaceX, the company which built it. The private space industry, for so long reliant on government contracts and the deep pockets of a few industrialists, is no longer science fiction. Soon rockets, just like this one, will be as familiar as a Boeing 737. After watching the landing streamed on Twitter, Blumenthal – an early stage investor in an asteroid mining company – shares it with a WhatsApp group of like-minded individuals.

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Using a new family of Raptor rocket engines, the BFR will finally unseat Saturn V as the most impressive launch vehicle ever constructed. At the same time NASA is working on its Space Launch System which, when completed, will join the BFR in a new super-Saturn V category of spacecraft. Birth of a Private Space Industry Musk forecasts the first delivery of cargo to Mars using the ITS as soon as 2022, two years before the first humans set foot on the Red Planet. While his predictions are often right, Musk is notoriously late in delivery. That is partly a function of his business interests – renewables, electric cars and rockets – being at the cutting edge of industrial innovation.

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After Apollo, in order to reduce overheads and enable launches with greater frequency, NASA pursued the Space Shuttle program. Yet even that cost the US taxpayer half a billion dollars per launch, with the system enjoying no more than five flights a year at its peak. Since 2000 and the arrival of a private space industry, however, costs have fallen precipitously. Today a Falcon 9 rocket (much smaller than the Saturn V) costs SpaceX around $61 million to launch, while the larger Falcon Heavy is less than $100 million. Nevertheless, even those figures mean many companies and individuals stand little chance of reaching space, and even if they have the means to do so, there is currently a two-year waiting list for launch.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

When SpaceShipTwo finally has its inaugural flight, Branson and his two adult children, Holly and Sam, will be on board. The Space Futurist “Over the next 20 to 30 years, humanity will establish itself in space, independent of Earth.” Peter Diamandis is sublimely confident that the teething problems of the private space industry will soon be over and we’ll be on our way to becoming an interplanetary species. This isn’t a goal mentioned anywhere in the Space Act that guides NASA. As he put it, “Not since lungfish crawled out of the oceans onto land has this happened!”11 Like Richard Branson, Peter Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur and a Trekkie.

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His father was an engineer, so he was used to getting explanations of how things worked. He built rockets as a kid, but he grew up in South Africa, where there were no premade rockets, so he went to a drugstore, bought the ingredients for rocket fuel, and stuffed them into a pipe. Thirty years later, he was building rockets efficient enough to lead the budding private space industry. He also showed personality traits that would serve him well later and propel him into the top echelon of innovators and entrepreneurs. His mother said he had devoured the entire Encyclopædia Britannica by the time he was nine, and he remembered much of it. She had to check that he was getting something to eat and wearing fresh socks every day.

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Spacesuits have changed very little since the 1960s; the Americans, Russians, and Chinese all use bulky and clunky suits that offer safety but limited mobility.9 A spacesuit has to deal with vacuum and temperature extremes; it has to protect against micrometeorites and infiltration by dust; it has to provide breathable air; and it has to monitor the occupant’s vital signs. The private space industry is hiring top designers for a new generation of spacesuits; in response, NASA turned to social media by having the public vote among the final designs for its next spacesuit. The winner, called Z-2, has collapsing pleats and electroluminescent blue patches and looks strangely retro.10 Beyond the style makeover, there are more substantial improvements.

The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway by Ben Mezrich

Elon Musk, independent contractor, private spaceflight

Bigelow’s design team had extended this vision; his idea was first to attach modules to the International Space Station, to replace the already existing crew Habitation Module of the International Space Station, and eventually to plant his own space station in orbit, then after that—on the Moon. From the very beginning, Bigelow had believed that the TransHab could be the backbone of the private space industry. If NASA didn’t have the will—or the dollars—to move forward with the space race, Bigelow—along with Musk, and many others—felt that it was up to the private sector to do it. Although NASA held the patents on the device, Bigelow had moved quickly to take over the project. Three years of negotiation and he was able to buy the rights to the idea, at which point he’d discovered that the technology and materials necessary to make the TransHab work were nowhere near as developed as advertised.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Tesla’s stamping machines were inherited from NUMMI (adapted to stamp light aluminum rather than the old steel), but the automation that drives them is all new. So, too, for the supply chain. Musk is a zealot about bringing as much fabrication as possible in-house, and he’s got the experience to know how to do it. This is what he did with his rocket company, SpaceX, which is now leading the private space industry. Its basic rocket technology is not much different from what NASA uses, but its production processes are what allows it to get to orbit at a fraction of the cost. Unlike the complex (and politicized) network of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors of NASA’s aerospace industry model, SpaceX makes almost everything itself using digital fabrication tools.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

So, that day in the diner — despite Peter’s exuberance, despite the fact that, back then, the XPRIZE had no major sponsors and no money in the bank, and despite the fact that NASA had called his idea utterly impossible and the entire aerospace industry had agreed — from where I was sitting, some maverick opening the space frontier didn’t seem too outlandish. Of course, today, with the XPRIZE won, with the private space industry worth more than a billion dollars, none of this may seem incredibly shocking. But it was. In 1997, space was off-limits to anyone but big government. This much was gospel. Yet I left that diner absolutely certain that sometime in the next decade, the far frontier would open for business. I also left the diner a little gobsmacked.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Science fiction author and journalist Tim Maughan has argued that people like Thiel who worry about the slowing of technological innovation miss how technology has been deployed over the past several decades. The space program and other visible projects had slowed down before the recent expansion of the private space industry, but innovation has still been taking place—it has just been outside the realm of what most people see in their day-to-day lives. Thanks to networked technologies, the world has become much more complex as computers have taken over functions that previously had at least some human role. “From social media to the global economy to supply chains,” Maughan explained, “our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”18 These systems are designed to speed up transactions and interactions in service of efficiency, but, in the process, we have given up a lot of democratic power over them, even as we have failed to equip those systems with “an ability to make ethical decisions and moral judgments.”19 The stock market, where automation has increased both the speed and quantity of trades, is an example of this, but the best one is the system of logistics and global supply chains that has been built out over the past fifty years.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

The $1.49 billion deal was negotiated by Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s director of economic development, who extracted $40 million in tax incentives from local and state governments. But if Clark thought he would get another commendation from Bezos, he was wrong. Amazon’s new air hub was going to create around two thousand new jobs. In contrast, electric automobile maker Tesla—run by Elon Musk, Bezos’s chief rival in the private space industry as well as for public adulation—had secured $1.3 billion in tax breaks a few years before for a battery plant in Nevada, dubbed the Gigafactory. Tesla was projecting it would create 6,500 jobs. It had earned about thirteen times more in tax incentives, per job, than Amazon. Bezos, of course, had spotted the difference.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

The underlying infrastructure transforms from everyone fighting over access to a couple of railway systems to something much closer to mass transit. Back in 2008, hardly any investment money flowed into private space endeavors. Musk and Bezos, with his start-up Blue Origin, were the main private rocket players, and very few satellite start-ups existed. Over the past decade, however, tens of billions of dollars have poured into the private space industry. The obvious transition has been from that of governments to billionaires and then to venture capitalists. Trying out an idea in space no longer requires congressional approval or some wild-eyed dreamer willing to risk his personal fortunes; it just requires a couple of people in a room agreeing that they’re willing to spend someone else’s money on a huge risk.