FYI,

"Past and Future of 'New Space'"
MSNBC
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/05/21/1939893.aspx

: The documentary "Orphans of Apollo" focuses on the effort to
: privatize Russia's Mir space station, shown here during a 1995
: space shuttle mission to the outpost. The effort helped prolong
: Mir's life but ultimately failed, leading to its demise in 2001.

: A behind-the-scenes documentary on the unsuccessful effort to turn
: Russia's Mir space station into a money-making operation serves as
: a cautionary tale for the private sector's present-day space
: ambitions.

: "Orphans of Apollo," a movie that tells the story of the
: masterminds and millionaires behind MirCorp, has been making the
: film-festival circuit for months and is already on DVD. It's
: getting its London premiere on Friday, according to the
: documentary's director and executive producer, Michael Potter.

: A decade ago, when the dot-com boom was going strong, a
: well-connected group of space enthusiasts and entrepreneurs laid
: plans to set up their own commercial beachhead in outer space. The
: title of the movie refers to the fact that many of these
: self-described revolutionaries were inspired by the Apollo moon
: landings that began 40 years ago - and then stopped 37 years ago.

: "It was over in the government's minds, but a lot of young kids
: there, myself included, were ready for what was next," Peter
: Diamandis, the head of the X Prize Foundation, says in the film.
: "We drank the Kool-Aid."

: Diamandis and many others anticipated an age when they themselves
: could follow Apollo's pioneers to the final frontier, and felt
: profoundly let down by what they saw as NASA's retreat. "We, as
: Apollo's children, felt we were Apollo's orphans. We had been left
: out in the cold," said Rick Tumlinson, co-founder of the Space
: Frontier Foundation.

: So when Russia's space officials began thinking about getting rid
: of Mir and turning their attention to the international space
: station, the revolutionaries began thinking about the
: opportunities. The central figure in the fight to save Mir turned
: out to be Walt Anderson, an "anarcho-capitalist" telecom
: millionaire with a penchant for supporting space causes.

: "I had approached Walt earlier and said to him, 'Would you like a
: space station, because I think we can get it,'" Tumlinson recalls
: in the movie. "And he said, 'Yeah.'"

: "Orphans of Apollo" chronicles the rise and fall of MirCorp, the
: venture created to turn Mir into an orbiting commercial paradise,
: through present-day interviews as well as extraordinary home video
: shot during Anderson's business dealings.

: One sequence of shots shows Anderson and his buddies feasting on
: take-out pizza and wine and playing Risk while they fly on the
: millionaire's private jet for a crucial round of talks in Russia.
: During the year 2000, MirCorp's team spun out grand plans to
: refurbish the space station as a tourist destination and the
: setting for a reality-TV show. At one point NBC, one of the
: partners in the msnbc.com joint venture, had a deal with MirCorp
: and "Survivor" creator Mark Burnett to use Mir as the centerpiece
: of a prime-time series.

: Thanks to Anderson's millions, MirCorp got their Russian
: "landlords" to send one more crew up to the space station in
: mid-2000 and keep the place running. But that was the venture's
: high point. The grand ambitions of Apollo's orphans ran up against
: a perfect storm of personality clashes, politics and economics.

: On the personality front, Anderson didn't even bother to hide his
: contempt for governments, particularly his own. The video shows him
: telling the Russians at one point during their negotiations, "We're
: dealing with some of the stupidest bureaucrats in Washington at the
: State Department."

: Unfortunately for Anderson, those bureaucrats would turn his life
: into a special kind of hell. NASA and other government agencies
: were worried that keeping Mir in operation would siphon off Russian
: resources that were needed by the infant international space
: station.

: "Our concern was that it was an old vehicle and was costing more
: and more to maintain," Leon Fuerth, Al Gore's former national
: security adviser, says of Mir in the film. "And we wanted the
: Russians, if they had to choose which way to put their money, to
: put the money on what was coming rather than keep it going to what
: was clearly no longer useful."

: The veterans of MirCorp suggest that NASA pushed hard on the
: Russians, the State Department and anyone else who mattered to kill
: Mir off. "I put a reward out for $1,000 for the person who can come
: up with the smoking gun," Potter, the film's director, told me.
: "From the MirCorp side of things, they always felt there was this
: conspiracy."

: It didn't help that Anderson was often portrayed as an eccentric
: space nut. One famous New York Times article was accompanied by a
: cartoon tracing the adventures of "Wacky Walt."

: But the nail in MirCorp's coffin was the dot-com bust that started
: in 2000 and gathered momentum as the months went on. Anderson had
: anticipated adding to his fortune and bringing in new investors,
: but the money troubles worsened instead. The Russians lost
: patience, and in April 2001, Mir was deep-sixed for good.

: MirCorp tried to carry on, working on a reality-TV deal that called
: for pop singer Lance Bass to fly to the international space station
: in 2002. But Anderson eventually soured on the whole enterprise.
: And that wasn't the worst of it: In 2005, federal authorities
: arrested Anderson in what was then called the "biggest personal tax
: evasion case ever." Today, Anderson is serving a nine-year prison
: sentence and facing a $184 million tax bill.

: Most of this seems like ancient history to those of us who covered
: MirCorp's rise and fall, but the movie clearly shows that Apollo's
: orphans have learned their lessons.

: "This stuff really is rocket science," Potter said, "and it's not
: just the physics. It's the business model: How do you handle the
: risk assessment? How do you handle the insurance? It's really
: complicated - but it's not as complicated as NASA makes it."

: The biggest lesson is that you want to have the government as your
: customer, not your enemy. "I think the slightly more commercial and
: realistic and politically savvy entrepreneurs who are now investing
: in private space understood where Walt went wrong," David Chambers,
: who was MirCorp's vice president of strategic planning, says in the
: movie. "And they're prepared to play nice with the various
: governments that they need to play nice with."

: The examples are legion: SpaceX's Elon Musk has received millions
: from NASA to develop a new rocket and spaceship (with a crucial
: Falcon 9 launch planned this year). Scaled Composites' Burt Rutan
: has benefited from government contracts as well as investments from
: billionaires such as Paul Allen and Richard Branson. Robert
: Bigelow, a billionaire himself, is hoping government business will
: eventually help sustain his own privately funded space station
: program. XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace and many other "New
: Space" companies rely on government contracts to keep the money
: coming in while they work on their rocket revolution.

: Potter said he's applying the lessons from "Orphans of Apollo" in
: his own work with Odyssey Moon, one of the teams entered in the
: $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition.

: "We don't view ourselves as competing with NASA," he said. "We're
: just a gear in the cog. You want FedEx to the moon? We'll take care
: of that. ... We're pretty typical, if you compare us with a lot of
: Silicon Valley tech ventures."

: And it's pretty typical that some ventures fade away while others
: keep going. To conclude, here's a quick rundown on how some of the
: space revolutionaries have fared since MirCorp faded:

: - One of MirCorp's founding directors, Indian-American tech
: entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria, is now chairman of PlanetSpace, a
: launch venture that competed unsuccessfully for some of NASA's
: spaceship development funds. PlanetSpace recently lost an appeal of
: NASA's decision.

: - MirCorp's president and chief executive officer, Jeffrey Manber,
: went on to found Yuzoz, a space-themed company producing random-
: number generator software. Yuzoz has officially gone under, but
: Manber is now working on a book about Russia's space overtures to
: the West (including the MirCorp saga).

: - Tumlinson has founded business ventures to create flight suits
: for commercial space shots and offer "space diving" for thrill-
: seekers on the final frontier. (If you need help imagining what
: space diving would be like, check out the latest "Star Trek" movie.)

: - While MirCorp's principals were struggling to keep their rented
: space station alive, Diamandis was pushing ahead with the X Prize
: Foundation and Zero Gravity Corp. Zero G was sold to Space
: Adventures last year, but the X Prize Foundation has branched out
: into genetics, automotive innovation, health care and other fields
: as well as space. The foundation is still best-known for putting
: together the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which Rutan's SpaceShipOne
: captured almost five years ago. The next big thing on Diamandis'
: schedule is next month's Incentive2Innovate conference at the
: United Nations.

Mark Reiff