eSpace calls for space entrepreneurs

eSpace: The Center for Space Entrepreneurship, a non-profit business incubator and workforce development organization for aerospace companies, today announced that it is seeking a second round of aerospace entrepreneurs to participate in the eSpace incubator. The move reflects the industry`s demand for eSpace services as well as the success of the incubator model created by eSpace and its potential for replication to cultivate space entrepreneurs in other regions of the country.

By opening its first center in Colorado, eSpace has placed itself in the middle of the nation`s second largest aerospace economy. The demand for eSpace and space entrepreneurs in Colorado is highlighted by the following statistics, furnished by the Colorado Space Coalition.

Read the details, HERE.

Space Investment Summit

William Watson, executive director of the Space Frontier Foundation, took part in the Space Investment Summit. (Michele McDonald - The Boston Globe)

Sean Teetan
Boston Globe

Rocket ships and outer space conjure up images of shuttle launches, moon landings, and the wonders of the unknown beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But for about 130 attendees of the Space Investment Summit yesterday at the Hynes Convention Center, these things are just business as usual.

The summit, which came to Boston for the first time since it started in 2007, gives entrepreneurs with space-related ideas an opportunity to try to convince prospective investors that their ideas are more than science fiction fantasies, but rather the next big thing.

Read the Story HERE.

CU-Boulder, SpaceDev launch space nonprofit

BOULDER — The University of Colorado and SpaceDev Inc., which has a 130-person site in Louisville, on Monday announced the formation of a nonprofit organization to further entrepreneurship and work force development in the space industry.

With initial funding of more than $1 million, eSpace: The Center for Space Entrepreneurship is designed to be multi-faceted in reach — serving as an incubator for startup aerospace businesses, funding new technology development on the university level and providing grants to high school graduates and community college students as a way to spur job growth.

It’s “an organization that would help people who were interested in starting space companies overcome the obstacles they had,” such as lack of infrastructure and equipment to access to funding, said Diane Dimeff, director of the organization.

ESpace’s primary funding came from the Metro Denver Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Develop initiative (WIRED), the Colorado Office of Economic Development, the University of Colorado, SpaceDev and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The five startups expected to participate in the program will each receive $20,000 grants and have access to some of the office and technical space at SpaceDev’s facility in Louisville. SpaceDev was acquired last year by electronic systems company Sierra Nevada Corp.

ESpace also will give a $90,000 grant to CU’s aerospace engineering sciences department to fund an eSpace Venture Design program. The initial round of eSpace-funded technologies will include an experiment to develop nanosatellites to improve the prediction of solar storms and their effects on Earth; a “mini jet engine” for unmanned aerial vehicles; and an unmanned aerial system to measure micro-weather effects of storms and wildfires, officials said.

Betatronix gets space kudos

Gary Dymski
NEWSDAY

Betatronix LLC, a Hauppauge-based custom builder of potentiometers, received a thank-you from NASA yesterday for its work on the Mars Rover project about four years ago.

The company built potentiometers for the Rover project, which in January celebrated a fourth anniversary on Mars, said Joseph Yanosik, Betatronix's director of sales engineering. Potentiometers are position indicators that monitor feedback on movable parts in space. Betatronix makes the devices for the space and defense industries.

Humna Khan, NASA supplier outreach administrator, presented Betatronix chief executive Michael Ryan with a panoramic photo of the Mars surface with the Betatronix name in the foreground, Yanosik said.

The company was started in 1966 by Joseph Yanosik Sr., who was in charge of Betatronix when it supplied the Rover program.

Obama’s modest proposal: no hue, no cry? (part 2)

With a half-century of political experience under my belt (yes, quite literally) coincident with the Space Age itself, I've reluctantly accepted the short-term thinking built into the original concept of a limited federal government in the United States later adapted to a preeminent role for central government, particularly in the 20th Century.

Early in the modern period of long neglect of lunar exploration, whose ending may finally be upon us, I became one of millions who at one time or another were loosely confederated as "Space Advocates," and similarly early on it became clear that, more often than not, we shared little else in common in our understanding of The Way Things Work.

Demographics are harsh things. Harsh enough to allow Senator Obama only a one in five chance of being elected president, for example, while delivering up a federal entitlement burden likely to squeeze NASA further and further into "the Out Years" in the decades ahead.

Greg Zsidisin in The Space Review continues this week, in "Obama's modest proposal," to confront an ancient sophistry I grew tired of hearing repeated endlessly in 1970, and the "Zero-Sum" model that needlessly pits a never-ending need for expansion of social programs against government-funding for space exploration.

That this ridiculous thinking merely survives, now into a sixth decade, adds to the argument that the future of government-funded lunar exploration and beyond belongs to moody Internationalism or to Entrepreneurship, with the former representing a mindset by nature intolerant and suspicious of the latter.

In again highly recommending Zsidisin's article, I have to again remind my fellow "entrepreneurs" that the age-old entanglement of academia and Collectivism likely makes under-funding of NASA less a threat to human space travel than Regulation.

Read Zsidisin's Article HERE.

Investment in entrepreneurial innovation: why cooperate?

by Paul Eckert, Ph.D.

THE SPACE REVIEW

An international Space Investment Summit Coalition is showing how a disparate group of companies and nonprofit organizations can unite in working toward a common long-term objective: financing sustainable entrepreneurial innovation in the emerging commercial space industry. The challenge facing the Coalition is significant, because seed and early-stage investors have high standards for evaluating entrepreneurial business opportunities—standards that many space-related startup companies find difficult to meet. Rather than sitting back and waiting for this situation to improve, the Coalition is taking action. The group’s basic approach is to organize periodic summits—events designed to educate entrepreneurs regarding how to meet the investor standards, while simultaneously informing investors about space-related business opportunities. This incremental process may gradually help improve the quality of entrepreneurial business plans presented and consequently attract an increasing number of investors to consider them. As more and more new businesses become sufficiently attractive to secure investment capital, new space-related markets may develop, with benefits for all concerned.

Read more HERE.