NewSpace Watch, Space-For-All/Clark Lindsey - The Next Killer Space App: Some Candidates

NewSpace Watch, Space-For-All/Clark Lindsey - The Next Killer Space App: Some Candidates

For microcomputers, word processing and spreadsheets were killer apps that drove the young industry upwards.

For the internet, email and the Netscape graphical browser created the web business

What is the kill app for space?

Peter Diamandis talks of space creating the first Trillionaire

Right now government projects are driving a lot of space flight.

Personal Spaceflight is a real app.   Currently there are about 570 Virgin Galactic reservation at $200,000 per seat.  XCor has about 200 reservations.  Armadillo has several reservations.  Many are working with the Russian.  Both the data and high quality market studies (Tauri Group 2012) indicate there is a substantial market for personal flight.

Science studies in space: There is an article by Alan Stern coming out in the April edition of Scientific American on "Commercial Spaceflight Companies will Revolutionize Space Space."  Clark listed various sources of funding for science research in space.

Microgravity Apps: Lots of interesting research on Shuttle and Mir, but the flights are too expensive and too infrequent.  And they barely scratch the surface.

Biotech in Microgravity: Protein crystals still have lots of interest.  Cells respond in unexpected ways in microgravity.  They have found the micro-g makes cells and their genes go a bit nuts.  There is a lot to learn.  Some experiments have found that dormant genes can be activated in micro-gravity.

A Harvard researcher with physics experiment on the ISS said the crew carrying out the work produced 100 times more high quality data than expected, because of the modifications and improvements they made on the spot.


Conclusion: Personal spaceflight and micro-g R&D are proving to be very promising near term, sustainable applications.  People and Serendipity will provide the Ultimate Killer App.


The full agenda for Space Access 2013 agenda.