Bill Boland said Teachers In Space is a project of the Space Frontier Foundation. Bill had a quote from Bill Gates: “When I compare our schools to what I see when I travel abroad, I’m terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.”
As Teachers in Space travels around the US they find a great concern about education. The purpose of Teachers in Space: Recognize teachers, energize their efforts, and prime the space flight pump. They want to get legislation passed to fund teachers into space. They want a demonstration project.
Here are some of the benefits they are working towards: Role models, Magnets of excellence, recruiting and retaining, communication. The goal for national legislation would fund about 500 teachers into space each year, they are planning on one teacher from each congressional district. They have a draft in progress, but it is large. They would like input on which government agency should be the lead agency to head this up. Someone in the audience said two to consider would be the Department of Commerence and the Department of Education.
There was a discussion about the teacher selection process. It looks like it would cost about $2 million for a teacher selection process. Teachers in Space might work with Teacher of the Year.
There current plan is to start putting teachers in space around 2010.
Part of the goal is to get students exposed and informed about the future possibilities.
They all ready have five different companies who have volunteered to fly teachers into space.
Clark's report on Bill's talk
The next speaker was Sam Dinkin of SpaceShot. SpaceShot is proposing a trip around the moon. Sam showed a video of lift off, docking with the International Space Stations, out around the moon, and back. It would be a three week trip. They’ll be selling it for $100 million.
Sam says SpaceShot is a media company, not a space company. If they are bought as a media company, and they have enough players, they could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Their research has found that older adults are jaded and reluctant to play. Kids are excited, but don’t tend to have credit cards. They have repositioned their game as a free game. Teenagers have lots of time and interest.
Sam says that once there are enough flights and winners the older than 17 crowd will become more interested. He pointed out that millions of dollars are spent on online poker. Sam believes that at least 1% of those playing online poker would love to win a ride in space.
He covered some similar competitions. Virgin Volvo 2005 Giveaway had 130,000 players, but it was a one time shot. Microsoft rocket plane Vanishingpoint Game had 88,000 players, but it was also a one time shot. Texas Lottery has seven million players.
The revenue is based on the number of players, how often, the ad rate, and the number of ads play. They are getting about 60 cents per 1000 ads.
The flight around the moon will need million players.
It doesn’t cost very much to run SpaceShot. Servers cost about $500 a month. SpaceShot is early to market, no one is putting people into space, and Bigelow doesn’t have his hotel up and running.
Their business goals are to get 200,000 daily players by 2012. They are expecting to develop new games.
Sam sent me an email says: “I have produced a lesson plan teaching kids 7-12 how to play the Free Space Shot weather prediction game. It really gets them jazzed about math and science. The free trip to space doesn't hurt kids' enthusiasm. The lesson plan can be found in the ‘for parents’ section. You can find out more about Free Space Shot at my presentation at 9:20 at Space Access.”
Clark's report on Sam's talk
Rand's report
Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace spoke next. Jeff said they turned a profit last year! The audience loudly clapped. Jeff said the money came in faster than they had projects to spend it. They did about $3.8 million in revenue last year, and he expects they will do about the same this year. They have 34 employees. About half their money comes from government contracts. XCOR has vehicles that they want to build. They look for customers who have problems to solve that XCOR wants to solve. So they solve them for someone else and they afterwards they have learned.
This year they have three engine projects. One of them is building the engine Rocket Racer. They signed with last year, and then after a couple months they were told by Rocket Racer that they were developing faster than the other business parts of Rocket Racer. Jeff likes working with Rocket Racer, it is fun work. They are expecting to turn the rockets around in ten minutes.
The relationship with ATK has been better than Jeff expected. Jeff says it is possible to work with the big companies.
Jeff then showed a video of some work on engines. One of the engines was large, they did a test run, and the flame was a couple dozen feet. Beautiful. Then the video showed the engine for the Rocket Racer. They are expecting lots of short burns with Rocket Racers.
He is expecting when he comes back next year he is to have had his first ride.
He is going to try to have a clearer public message on their plans for the future, with out getting into details.
Jeff talked about the challenges in dealing with NASA. The people he is dealing with are sharp. They have built and fired engines. He has found that the cultural at NASA is so foreign that it hard to communicate. NASA has been surprised with the results that XCOR has been producing. One of the challenges in dealing with NASA is there are so many different groups.
Jeff said it is rough dealing with ITAR. He doesn’t plan to lead the fight to change ITAR. If someone else lead the charge, he’ll support. Like Jerry Pournelle said last night we need to give them a golden bridge, a place to go. We have to agree that it is important that the United States maintains its technological led. We have to point out that ITAR is not working, and provide an alternative. Jeff doesn’t have the alternative.
Another policy question is what do we want NASA to be. Jeff isn’t sure. He does support NACA. He says it was a good thing. NASA is no longer in the R&D business. The Air Force has their own research arm and does work in space. DARPA is also focusing on research in space. But they are not looking for dual use research. He isn’t sure what the right policy going forward is to retask NASA with the job of doing R&D. He says Congress doesn’t realize that R&D is not being doing for commercial space.
Rand's observation on Jeff's talk
Clark's observations
First: Introduction
Overview: the agenda
Previous: Andrew Tubbiolo, Misuzu Onuki, Kevin Sagis
Next: Ken Davidian on space prizes
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