Parabolic Arc

Let me see if I have the idea right.

(1) You crowdsource a kind of online brainstorm – soliciting/filtering/selecting ideas.

(2) You use crowdfunding to get an approximation of price signal: what will people pay to be recognized *as donors*, even if they get back something less than the value of their contribution?

It’s very typical of startups to get into business based on one idea, then, after initial orbital insertion, to turn 90 degrees when some other opportunity suddenly looks better. What’s new here is the idea of crowdsourcing your reaction wheel torque. I see nothing wrong with the approach, so long as it’s understood that people are freely giving away their marketing advice, in stage one.

I would have suggested Mark Klein’s Deliberatorium concept for stage one, since it’s pretty obvious that the first stage is already exhibiting some of the pathologies that Deliberatoria were designed to address. But there’s time to refine the process of refinement. The bigger problem, I think,is whether there’s a way to make much money at all on Arkyds, except for the engineering services enabled by learning how to make them (which we’re told are how the company makes money now).

Planetary Resources has already proposed a near-term business model, essentially spelled into its name: small-scale optical remote sensing. If there’s a question mark here, it’s whether optical really has a market at such small scales. Remote sensing satellites are usually bigger; I’m no photography expert, but when you’re going for maximum optical resolution at very low exposure times, I think camera size *does* matter.

The longer-term business model — asteroid mining — is hugely speculative and decidedly *not* the stuff of Venture Capital, which usually seeks a path to profit within half a decade. Even Eric Andersen has said that resource-return is probably decades away. The roster of Big Money Names behind the company only says, “Big Money will be available if someone can make a case for ROI.” A solid case for ROI is probably not something you want to hold your breath for, however. An insistence that the company is *really* about asteroid mining isn’t disingenuous, if the focus is on how to stay in business while finding a path forward to that goal. What I see Planetary saying here is, in effect, “We’re not sure of the path — please help us.” If nothing else, it demonstrates an appealing humility.

“Kickstarter is for underfunded new projects or start-ups with a bright idea”

It has been. But if all you see is nails being hammered, you’ll never think about the uses of the claw on the other side of the hammerhead. Kickstarter might have more uses than we know. (Please note that Kickstarter campaigns must be approved by Kickstarter, so they apparently didn’t have a problem with this one.)

Zero G, a Diamandis startup, saw the claw on the hammerhead: they patented the business model of running zero- and reduced-gravity flights by day, package delivery by night. I don’t know if they ever executed on that, but it shows they aren’t dumb. And Planetary’s idea has a similar flavor: dayside, Arkyds look at earth resources; nightside, it’s looking for gold among the stars. (OK, OK, platinum among the stars; you knew what I meant.)

“Planetary Resources is a billion dollar backed business”

Um, no. It’s a startup company with some gigabuck *names* endorsing it and advising it. But that doesn’t mean those people have put anything like that kind of money behind it. They’re a pretty shrewd bunch.

Admittedly, Diamandis has screwed up on messaging before — the infamous ISDC talk where he tried to reiterate John Walker’s actually rather clever essay about how “A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away.” Still a sensible message after all these years, but Diamandis picked wrong medium. In an essay pointing to a Nazi proto-space-program effort, you can add all the necessary qualifications — and Walker did. In a speech or panel discussion, you’ve just brought Godwin’s Law down on your own head.

But I don’t think going to Kickstarter in this way would be much of a message screwup, if at all. Sure, it’s problematic. But the proof is in the pudding, and so far, the pudding is some ideas that might yet be blended and cooked into a decent revenue stream. And is there anything flatly unethical about it? I don’t see that either. We shouldn’t let our envy of these people’s wealth get in the way of seeing that they might simply be trying to figure out for themselves if Planetary is a good investment, and trying new and different ways to figure it out.

“I don’t know if Planetary Resources has actually asked Kickstarter for approval for anything yet.”

Admittedly, I haven’t gone looking for a reaction from Kickstarter. Maybe there is one already, and maybe it’s not good.

“Nobody in their right mind would have even estimated it …. never ran across any estimate of the per unit cost of the V-2.”

John Walker might be a little crazy, but he’s not exactly stupid. And the argument that cheap space access is only a matter of economies of scale in manufacturing is actually quite a popular one in NewSpace circles. (In fact, Rand Simberg felt that he could wave away an entire essay of mine http://www.thespacereview.com/article/180/1 on the basis of that argument alone.)

Walker’s Rocket a Day essay:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html

After Walker’s back-of-the-envelope calculation (his $13K is based on 1993 dollars, by the way, so Diamandis even had *that* wrong), he writes:

“Stating the obvious…. The V-2 was a suborbital vehicle, intended to lob high explosive over relatively short distances. Quantity production of the V-2 at Mittelwerk was accomplished with unpaid slave labour under the brutal rule of the SS. And the failure rate was unacceptable by current standards.”

After further analysis/handwaving, however, Walker arrives at $1.3M per launch for paid labor working in relatively automated factories producing relatively reliable vehicles reaching orbit. $333/lb? That price would spur a lot of the more financially comfortable baby boomers to ding their retirement kitties for a trip to orbit ….

Diamandis would have been much better off if he had initially credited Walker and put the various caveats — including the slave labor factor — front and center. And I understand what you’re saying about sanity here. But in some view of things, nobody at NASA in his right mind would have hired anybody associated with the terror bombing of civilians. That’s a rear-view-mirror picture, however. (Not least because the U.S. itself had engaged in terror bombing, hitting the urban cores of about 60 Japanese cities, and in some cases using similar tactics in Europe.) Somehow, von Braun became part of our pantheon, and he was hardly the only Paperclip brain imported.

If you want to make a case for economical space access, you have to take your existence proofs where you can find them. The main thing Diamandis showed at ISDC 2006 is that you should be very careful how you make that case. Diamandis might be singing off-key about Kickstarter funding for Arkyd missions. Who knows? But it seems like every day, recently, I re-learn something Monte Davis once wrote, sagely, around the same time as that Diamandis gaffe: “Everybody wants space.” What John Carter McKnight called the Spacefaring Web may require the Web itself, and all its communication innovations. Kickstarter is one of these innovations, and if everybody wants Planetary Resources to succeed, I think only a serious messaging error would doom any such Kickstarter campaign.