Can Capitalism Survive in Space? 

Watching the Americans figure out what they're going to do with their broken, bleeding and bankrupt national space program is turning into a series of useful lesson for Canadians and others interested in developing space focused industries.

But few are aware  that the present situation follows logically from a series of past decisions and historical events and the best way to learn about these events is from one of the people who influenced and contributed to those decisions.

Jeffery Manber, is one of those people. According to Wikipedia, Manber has been involved in several of the key breakthrough commercial space projects, principally those revolving around the commercialization of space assets as well as the integration of the Russian space industry into major space programs, including that of the International Space Station.

Here's a talk he gave recently at the University of Michigan on the topic of whether capitalism can survive in space.



The most interesting point he makes is that while private companies can certainly survive and thrive in space, they can only do so only if the government is not opposed to such ventures. In the 1980's and the 1990's the US government and NASA were opposed to commercial space activities and so no independent space focused industry developed in the US.

However, some interesting lessons were learned and space focused businesses did develop in (of all places) Russia. Now the US plays catch-up and Manber provides useful insight into why this is so (for example, he doesn't think NASA was terribly helpful).

The Canadian government, the Canadian Space Agency, the various organizations administering and contributing to Canadian science policy might want to take note of these interesting historical lessons.

CSCA to Discuss "Growing Canadian Space Sector" at Upcoming Toronto Meeting

As those who follow this blog and my companion column on SpaceRef.ca (titled "This Week in Space for Canada") are aware, the Canadian Space Agency released their 2008 State of the Canadian Space Sector Report late last year with conclusions reflecting consistent double digit growth for Canadian space focused firms. According to this report, the top ten highest earning Canadian space focused companies each showed double digit real growth ranging from 12% to 48%.

With recent news reports indicating that major Canadian space component manufacturers are “moving up the food chain” in order to build complete satellites and with strong indications of a global satellite market remarkably unaffected by the global economic crisis, the time is right for a comprehensive discussion focusing on the state of the Canadian space sector including strategies for taking advantage of upcoming opportunities, avoiding obvious pitfalls and comparing the Canadian business environment to other jurisdictions.

This is exactly what the Canadian Space Commerce Association intends to do at their up coming 2010 Annual General Meeting, scheduled for March 16th in Toronto, Ontario at the MaRs Development District. As secretary/ treasurer of this organization, I'm extending an invitation to my readers to attend and participate in this discussion of the business opportunities available right now in the high frontier.

I hope to see many of my readers there. We're at the very beginning of the next big "gold rush" or maybe even a maslow window as promoted by the people over at 21st Century Waves and Canadians are well placed to take advantge of these new opportunities.

Profitable Upcoming Events and Useful Places to Be

Here's an interesting list of upcoming space, aerospace, venture capital and business focused events occurring over the next couple of months. Think of it a basic list of profitable places to go, interesting people to meet and useful organizations to connect with. Some of these events are even in Canada.

In order of occurrence (but not necessarily of importance) they are as follows:

• The National Angel Capital Organization is holding one of their business breakfast sessions on the topic of Raising Cash from Angels and VC's on January 20th in Mississauga, Ontario. This is a great event for business owners and entrepreneurs whether or not they they work in newspace, aerospace or some other sort of traditional space. 
• The Secure World Foundation, the Space Security Index and the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. are holding an Outer Space Security Briefing focusing on trends, new developments and an "assessment of the status of space security" on January 21st at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
• The Astronomy & Space Exploration Society (ASX) at the University of Toronto is holding their 7th Annual 'Expanding Canada's Frontiers' Symposium on January 29th in Toronto, Ontario.
• The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are holding the 13th Annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference, organized around the theme of “Igniting the Space Economy” on February 10–11 in Arlington, Virginia.
• The Lunar and Planetary Institute is holding it's Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder Colorado on February 18-20th focusing on opportunities that next-generation suborbital vehicles like Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, Blue Origin's New Shepard, XCOR's Lynx and others offer for research, education and public outreach. 
• The French Chamber of Commerce in Canada is hosting the 6th Annual Venture Capital Forum in Montreal on February 1-2 and in Boston, Massachusetts on February 3rd on the topic of "financing innovation." This years guests  are expected to include Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette and former ESA astronaut Claudie Haigneré.
• The American Conference Institute is holding an ITAR Bootcamp in San San Diego, California on February 24-25th mostly for American firms needing comprehensive, practical information on upgrading in-house ITAR compliance programs but also quite useful as background information for Canadian firms looking to grow their US business.
• The 2010 Canadian Space Commerce Association Annual General Meeting is being held in Toronto, Ontario on March 16th and is focused on the growing Canadian commercial space sector. 
• The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is hosting a Workshop on Suborbital Platforms and Nanosatellites at the John H. Chapman Space Centre in St-Hubert, Quebec on April 14-16th.
• The SpeedNews 8th Annual Aerospace & Defense Industry Suppliers Conference is being held in Los Angeles, California on May 3-5th and is designed for equipment manufacturers, marketing representatives, analysts and raw material suppliers.
• The Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute (CASI), a nonprofit technical organization for people interested in aeronautics, space and remote sensing is holding their ASTRO 2010 conference in Toronto, Ontario on May 4-6 focused on "Canada's Future in Space: A Mission in Collaboration."
• The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association's 2010 Annual Conference is being held in Ottawa, Ontario on May 26-28th and is focused on the topic of private equity, venture capital and their role in driving innovation.
• The next Space Investment Summit is being held in Chicago, Illinois on May 28th in conjunction with the annual International Space Development Conference (being held on May 26-28th) and will focus on prominent space focused business investors and and pre-qualified space-related business plans.
• The Canadian Institute of Geomatics is having their 2010 Canadian Geomatics Conference on June 14 - 18th in Calgary Alberta on the use of intelligent mapping to enhance Canadian global competitiveness. 
• The Space Frontier Foundation's conference on NewSpace 2010 is being held at the NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California on July 17-20th. The four day conference will explore public and private partnerships, small satellites and commercial space initiatives.
• COSPAR (the Committee on Space Research) is having it's 38th Annual Scientific Assembly in Bremen, Germany on 18-25 July 2010. This event is generally the biggest interdisciplinary conference on space science worldwide and well worth attending. 

The venture focused events are likely going to be the most boring but over the long run they might also be the most important connections that business owners and recent graduates need to make if they're truly looking to grow existing space focused businesses or fund a new space focused start-up.


LDRS 23-World's Largest Rocket Launch Music Video

Of course, not everyone is interested in the business only aspects of our upcoming next great age and for those people I've included this music video from the Tripoli Rocket Association which organizes annual amateur rocket launching events and was the first amateur organization to launch a rocket into space in 2004.

The music, written and performed by a band called CalmInSight is almost as fast as the rockets.

Changing Paradigms and the Rise of Hacker Ethics

For many space advocates around the world, our glorious and near mythological Apollo centric past remains front and center within the various large and small space focused organizations and lobby groups as they continue to champion giant macro-engineering projects with billion dollar plus budgets spread over decades as being the best (perhaps the only) way to open up the final frontier. Examples include space solar power advocates (including many who attended the November 2009 Space Canada Conference in Toronto), those in favor of colonizing the Moon or Mars (such as Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner in their book "The Case for Mars") and space elevator advocates.

Even within our only tangible legacy of that era, the US based National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) large and complex macro-engineering programs (such as the Constellation project) with ever growing price tags continue to be promoted even amidst the growing perception that NASA can be best understood as simply a massive public works project.

According to Professor John Hickman in his article "The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects":

While popular science writers typically describe the benefits to be derived from their favorite very large space development project in detail, their treatment of the crucial initial capitalization of such projects is typically sparse or implausible. Capitalization is a crucial problem for these projects because the total capital investment required is very large and the investment takes a very long time before producing economic returns. “Chunky” investments are unattractive to most private investors and lenders.

According to Edward Miller, this bias towards the large and complex is part of an unstated but also unquestioned belief in the need for "major public transportation projects, global supply chains, large scale social programs and economies of scale" when dealing with almost any current problem.

In his article "How to Redesign our Communities for the Internet Age" Miller states that these beliefs:

... have become so integral to our way of life, that they are hardly ever questioned. Granted, Wal-Mart is often used as a public target for venting our frustrations at these things, but virtually all business nowadays is conducted using global supply chains, economies of scale, and so forth. Thus, our political discourse usually revolves around ways to prop up these very systems, since these are the only ones we know.

Miller believes that centralized structures are able to create artificial scarcities and this invariably leads to corporatism, regulatory capture, secrecy and something he calls rent seeking which eventually stifles further progress and often results in the development of centralized and repressive hydraulic type empires where scientific advancement (and most growth of any kind) essentially ends.

This might not be the society space advocates envisioned when when they made the original demand for their pet mega-projects.

Miller suggests that the government role should be to encourage self contained and local scale invariant projects "like the hyper-local RepRap project which is allowing production right in your living room" to foster a "new urbanism" where production takes place in vertical farms, factories, and community hackerspaces.

According to Miller:

We need to incentivize open and collaborative production. For example, creating prizes for contributing to the Commons. In 2007 there was a proposed bill called the Medical Innovation Prize Act which sought to incentivize patent-less medical inventions. If only it was this sort of mentality that guided us for the past few decades, then we wouldn't have ever had such a monstrosity of a healthcare system. The same mentality could guide any industry. A useful exercise would be to think how it could guide the industry you are currently involved in.

This is the core of what people are beginning to refer to as the hacker ethic, but how does this new way of thinking relate to Canadian aerospace and space focused businesses and industries?



As outlined in this recent article from spaceref.ca titled "Canadian Space Agency Releases Report from the 6th Canadian Space Exploration Workshop" the answer might just relate to this recently released CSA Report.

According to the article, ten clear directions for future Canadian space activities are slowly emerging. These are astrobiology, advanced life support, Mars atmospheric studies, operational space medicine, planetary geology and geophysics, radiation effects on humans, solar terrestrial science, space astronomy, space life science and space physical sciences. The report states that Canadians are already making significant contributions in some of these areas.

Some of these areas also seem tailor made for small organizations operating on tiny budgets subscribing to the hacker ethic of sharing, decentralization and open access. Some might even be appropriate areas to start the development of the small self contained and local scale development organizations focused around the "hacker ethic."

This could be just what is needed to grow Canadian space focused industry at a fraction of the cost of traditional industrial development projects.

Maybe someone should start the process and build a hackerlab (perhaps using the existing Toronto based Hacklab.to as a model) in order to assist with some of these new CSA directions. After all, we don't want the CSA to end up like NASA, as "a massive public works project."