Dear Mark Shuttleworth aka Sabdfl,

I don’t know if you saw my post “10,000 bugs away from World Domination” which made my day by getting Digged and was even read by one of your engineers Scott James Remnant, but the thesis is that the challenge to widespread use of Linux is not that it doesn’t have wobbly windows and Xen support, though these are exciting features I look forward to in Eft, the problem is that it has bugs.

PC Hardware sucks

Few non-geeks fully realize how building software for PCs is staggeringly complicated. The work involved in getting every driver ready to handle sleep & hibernate is enormous, and that’s just one row in the hardware matrix. Brian Valentine, a Windows VP, once described Windows as a testing organization, and that is one of the reasons why it is so successful and why it ships so slowly. Microsoft software has its faults in addition to being buggy, but it is still pretty thoroughly debugged and they have buildings full of hardware and the electricity bills to prove it. (Think Steve Jobs could stomach buying a WinBook XLi to test their ‘fantastic‘ little platform on? Support for the Intel processor doesn’t get Mac OS X anywhere close to support for the PC platform.)

I think Linux needs some serious love in a couple of usability scenarios such as external monitors and printing, but from researching your bug list and doing anecdotal analysis of installs on 6 different machines I believe the current biggest challenge for humans with Ubuntu is bugs which only show up on certain hardware: install race conditions, power management issues, video card crashes, screen resolutions which can’t be set in the UI, hangs on startup, soundcards and bluetooth devices unrecognized, etc.

Ubuntu might be 10,000 bugs Away From World Domination, but a tremendous milestone is the 5,000 bugs to reach World Installation.

It is possible to work around almost any bug: hack your xorg.conf, disable power management, try the install again, swap hardware, etc. but these problems hurt the perception of Linux, waste even experts’ time, and are structural impediments to its widespread use. Whether Linux has the right set of applications and is ready for phase 3 (profit) of World Domination is mostly irrelevant until the system is up and running.

Ubuntu’s Maturity vs. SUSE & Fedora

Bugfixing is time-consuming and not particularly rewarding. What’s worse, from looking at your incoming workload, I believe that even if Ubuntu had 10x the number of devs, you would all still be running at 110%. (If you did grow that much, you’d then equal the resources of the big dogs SUSE and Redhat.)

Another challenge for Ubuntu is that in addition to its backlog of bugs, it is less mature than Redhat and SUSE. I recently saw an IBM laptop just like mine running SUSE, and hibernation worked with visual status of what was happening. I can only dream of those days on Ubuntu; hibernate has started working literally hours ago, though the flashing brown lines do not fill me with confidence. I know this is just one anecdote, but I have others. 🙂

The good news for desktop Linux is that Redhat and SUSE are learning from Ubuntu that they have done a bad job at evangelism, polish, freedom, and frequent releases. They also still have some catching up to some important Debian innovations:

• install that works, including wireless
• resizing NTFS on install [UPDATE: SUSE does this, but not Redhat]
• an excellent package manager, with an easy to use UI (how’d Debian stoop to that?)
• a free update service that works and which even supports in-place OS upgrades
• a distribution which can scale down to embedded devices
• a mature, stable, big, coherent platform
• Other good stuff? I barely know what I am talking about here.

Debian’s excellent qualities, and those which Ubuntu bring, make Debian/Ubuntu an excellent platform, but Ubuntu might very well be the OS that shows us the promise of Linux on the desktop, but not necessarily the one that keeps us.

Where to harvest eyeballs?

If I had your cards and credit at a Vegas blackjack table, I’d double-down. 🙂 Meanwhile, there should be ways to better use Debian’s resources for your common aims. Debian is a team of 1600 maintainers who has provided you a base set of 18,000 packages and while they aren’t necessarily interested in re-coloring their swirl orange, they presumably would like to have the improvements in desktop scenarios and the work on the larger variety of hardware that Ubuntu’s efforts and userbase bring to the table. It would be interesting to know how many Ubuntu bugs exist in Debian or would exist in Debian if they were using the same verson of the upstream code. In other words, if few of your bugs are Ubuntu specific, then we know for certain that their 3200 eyeballs would be helpful.

Perhaps you could consider radical things like aligning every 2nd or 3rd release with Debian, and therefore share compilers, the desktop kernel and more of the workload. I know this was not easy in the past, but both groups have been through a lot of changes in the last 2 years and you are now more closely aligned, sharing GCC 4.0, Kernel 2.6, modular X, etc. I also see Debian plans to ship this year and has done work on Xen and Xgl which aligns it well with Eft. Finally, these would be great releases to provide long-term support.

OSS Rulez

Once the bugs are fixed, it is then a good time to talk about Linux’s structural advantages. One of the biggest is the many packages. The Linux kernel isn’t what people will appreciate, it is the applications on top. When I talk to people about Linux, I am often asked whether there are any apps to run on it!! Behind the “Applications – Add/Remove…” menu item in Ubuntu is a pretty dialog box with a incredibly comprehensive set of applications from a Logo VM for Slashdotters in diapers, to many games equal to the task of multislacking that Windows provided with Solitaire, to all kinds of productivity and multimedia apps in between. To buy all that stuff in Windows would cost a fortune and in Linux it can be installed in just one click with no questions or nagging. (Of course, OSS also has other great communities of software, such as the one surrounding PHP, which has helped make Apache so popular.) Linux apps could all use a coat of polish, but with just a couple of doublings of desktop marketshare, plenty of geek resources and money will become available, and Linux will double 6 more times to reach 1 billion PCs.

Its a fun time to be running Linux on the desktop. It is close to being ready and the pace is incremental, but steady. The best news is that you can see the pace quickening. The 2.6.8 (800KB) kernel had ~550 contributors, while 2.6.14 (2.1MB) had 844, a growth of 50% in a timespan of 14 months. If the OSS dev efforts everywhere were to grow at that pace, life would be very good, and Microsoft’s position will finally be accepted as unsustainable. Now that Scott McNealy is gone, someone should tell the new CEO of Sun that a Linux desktop has more C# apps than Java apps, a stunning failure given Java’s enormous investments in the ostensibly open JCP and a 7-year head start. Let us hope that at least, the J2SE and smaller VMs become OSS. If I could free one chunk of code, it would be that.

Having just come in from the cold, I have great respect for Dapper, Debian, GNU/Linux, and to the free software movement as a whole. As the neocons say about Iran, “Faster, please!”

-Keith

P.S. I wrote an Open Letter to the DPL recently, saying that in theory I should be running Debian rather than Ubuntu, but also that Debian seems stagnant. I do think some of my ideas about backports and proprietary software were wrong, but I still believe that installing new apps post-ship, and proprietary apps and drivers present tough technical and philosophical challenges.

P.P.S. Last October, I did an interview with Bradley C. Edwards, one of world’s experts on the Space Elevator, in which we cover a bunch of topics. Perhaps the next time you go to space will be on a Space Elevator.

1000 readers but only 8 Diggs? I’m going to cry

UPDATE: Thank you for making it down here. Vote in the poll!

Dear DPL Anthony Towns,

I read your post-election comments about your mission as DPL to be increasing the tempo of Debian, and I think that is an excellent theme. This is the 21st century: Google existed only on paper 8 years ago, China and India are just coming online and will eventually contribute to OSS in a manner commensurate with their size, and maybe even in the Middle East and Africa they’ll quit killing each other or dying of pandemics and become productive members of the modern world. In 20 years, Linux will be running on 1 billion devices smaller than a PC and 1 billion PCs and Nicholas Negroponte will be giving us $100 to take one of his laptops. 1 billion PCs running Linux requires 20 years of 22% annual growth starting from ~20 million today. It needn’t happen that steadily and slowly as FireFox made it to 100 million in 1 year.

Linux, and the millions of lines of OSS on top and underneath it, is at an interesting inflection point: without fanfare, steadily making progress in the embedded, server, supercomputer, space, etc. space, but with little desktop marketshare and almost even smaller mindshare in the outside world. The lack of mindshare on the desktop is headwind for the server and embedded market and still allows for doubt of the legitimacy of the OSS development process.

OSS Picking up Steam
My initial experience with Debian was inauspicious. I was running Fedora Core 4, happily at the time, when I randomly bought a Linux magazine bundled with a Sarge (Debian 3.1) DVD, read a nice review of it, saw that it shipped with the 2.4 kernel, and promptly tossed it into the trash. As it turns out, 2.6 is supported in that release so my facts were wrong, but I stand by my sentiment. I have since discovered that 2.4 was only the default for Sarge and that now Debian is even transitioning away from the 2.4 kernel, and that is good. A Debian based on 2.4 might be a good reason for a derivative distribution, assuming there is still enough interest.

For comparison, FireFox is shipping once per year, Gnome is shipping twice per year and the Linux kernel is shipping 4 times per year. The Open Source movement is not only moving quickly but actually gaining momentum. The only constant is not simply change, but an increasing rate of change. This is in contrast to Debian, in which the last release took 3 years and the one before that took 2 years. I believe there is no technical reason why you cannot ship whenever you’d like. The Linux kernel merges in changes whenever they are ready without anything holding up the train. Your codebase is much bigger and your changes are more frequently more intrusive, but I believe there has to be a way to work things out even if it simply requires more resources.

Ubuntu & Debian
My second experience with Debian, running Ubuntu, has lasted much longer, and I am a happy customer and so is my father, who can’t really tell that he’s not running Windows anymore, though he does understand the geopolitical significance of it.

I have nothing against Ubuntu, and I love my operating system very much, but I believe that in principle, I should be running Debian. The Ubuntu guys took the efforts of your decade-old project, now containing 1,600 developers, added 10-30 of their own, threw in some new artwork, and have created a huge amount of excitement. Their success is a testament to their efforts, but to Debian’s even more. Of course, Debian’s success is a testament to many other people and so on, but Debian has built a large organization, focused itself on one big noble, common, goal and has built a superb system upon which there are 130 derivatives–one of which now threatens to dwarf Debian itself.

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lion’s den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help. Its a simple fact of math that their many new bugs can be more easily divided between 1600 people than 10-30.

I am not a zero-sum person, and while I do believe that every time someone installs Ubuntu, it is good for Debian, I also see a downside. When he files bugs, the knowledge gained by the dev fixing the bug will not necessarily flow upstream to you guys. When someone writes software for Ubuntu, it may not run on a Debian system. I think benefits flow downstream better than upstream and I’m not sure if Canonical’s new tools will fix that.

Ubuntu is a relative and therefore a friend, but they want both desktop and server customers and therefore threaten the center of gravity of Debian and its 130 derivatives. And if Debian developers think the excitement is elsewhere, they might not necessarily move to Ubuntu. I wonder whether it would be better for Ubuntu to send most interested developers upstream to you guys, or whether you could share work on the desktop kernel which still needs a lot of work for laptops.

What can Debian learn from Ubuntu?
I believe an important lesson to learn from Ubuntu is that excitement is generated when you ship fast. Also, it is important to focus on the desktop and ease of use. Developers are users of your software, and users become future developers. We all start out as noobs. Eric S. Raymond wrote a great memo about the difficulty of getting printing working in Linux and if software is too hard for him to use, then it is just not completely ready for the outside world yet. All the code is there: the drivers, the network protocols and the management UI; they just require spit and polish. You can build a powerful system which is also easy to use and apt and Debian-installer are superb examples of that.

Is Debian Stagnant?
While Ubuntu doesn’t have the large, experienced team that you have, they do have excitement and momentum. When I look through the Debian website, I see some worrying metrics:

• It is taking hundreds of days for new packages to be added, or for requests for help to be fulfilled.
• There are 189 bugs assigned to the x86 kernel, and the average age of those bugs is 1 year
• The Debian-apache e-mail alias is deathly quiet, other than spam (some cleverly containing bug numbers in the subject!), and mails wondering about Apache 2.2 go unanswered.
• You’ve got churn on your bug database at the rate of 12,000 entries per month or 600 per workday. If half of those are by the dev and a full-time dev can work on 5 bugs per day, then you’ve got the equivalent of 60 full-time devs working on bug fixing, or that your 1,600 devs are doing 1.5 hours of bugfixing per week.
  I’m not going to judge anyone else’s volunteer contributions, but it is interesting to have some high-level measurements of the excitement of the team. I’d be curious to know what others think of these swags and how they compare to the time people spend hacking in other projects, maintaining their free blogs, myspace pages or other hobbies.
• As Debian matures, your current set of volunteers might graduate from college, become satisfied or bored or otherwise move on.

A lot of what your devs do on a day to day base is hacking–integrating new versions of code, debugging it and keeping the system running. It is important stuff, but it is different from writing code and I believe it needs a constant stream of fresh blood to keep up with this somewhat tedious, labor-intensive task, and to allow your experienced people to solve the harder problems. You should be able to grow the team of contributors proportionally with the userbase if you want that. A lot of people would be excited to work on Debian and you should harness that.

What are the Big Issues?
In addition to a focus on desktop and polish, I think it is important to think big, long-term, and strategically. Things like apt and debian-installer play a big part in the definition of Debian. What future investments should your team be making? You could create a process whereby the community identifies the best big issues and then the DPL would provide the leadership to see that these efforts get off the ground. This can all happen in a meritocratic, volunteer process if there is buy-in. Here are a couple to think about:

• Allow users to run new versions of code without upgrading the OS. It is an unsupported scenario on both Ubuntu and Debian to run FireFox 1.5 on your released OSes. Ironically, my mom would be okay with FireFox 1.0 for years on end, but your most passionate customers are not. There are workarounds, but they are time-consuming. The current policy is to only support fixes for security bugs, but FireFox 1.5 contains many security enhancements, some of which must not been backported, and I’ll bet the FireFox team considers FireFox 1.5 to be better in every way, including security. There is a backports mechanism, but it is not a first-class mechanism.
  It should even be possible to test pre-releases of FireFox and so be ready to sim-ship with the Mozilla folks–that would be exciting! Likewise, OpenOffice.org is going to start shipping every 3 months. Upgrading apps after install is not only a problem for the big apps, but also the small ones: GtkPod is my latest discovery of an app which requires many steps to install if not using the ‘official bits’. [Update: Backports being ‘unsupported’ may be a bigger problem in Ubuntu than Debian.]
• Are there challenges which would limit your growth? If you had 10x the users, could you scale out your download mirrors and other infrastructure to handle it? I personally think a peer-to-peer APT would be cool and I know such a tool will get written if it makes sense, but developers don’t pay the bandwidth bills.
• We can hate closed source, but we cannot wish it away. Closed source video, network, modem and biometric drivers, apps like Flash, Real, Skype and Adobe Reader, codecs, and Sun’s Java 5 VM are examples of closed code that are an important part of a modern computer and need to be supported, grudgingly.

I don’t even know if those are good problems, I’m just proposing that you guys find some and start chipping away at them. There are many challenges Linus will never get to, unless he gets pissed off and creates a ‘Linus Gnu/Linux’ distro.

Debian as Man of The Year
Many people in the outside world still do not get even the basics of why Open Source is viable and actually superior to closed source and your organization needs to continue to make explaining this part of the public message.

I also find it interesting that Debian has very little name recognition compared to MySQL, Redhat and IBM, yet the fact that Debian is such a large effort is newsworthy and should get you at the seat at the table with anyone you’d like. Google made it on the cover of Time, and Debian could win ‘Man of The Year.’

Developer Productivity
By far, the biggest thing which is slowing down both open and closed source software development is the use of old tools. C and C++ are fundamentally 30 year-old programming languages and they don’t have garbage collection, metadata, language support for multi-threading, modern class libraries, do not agree on what a string is or how to allocate memory, are not portable, and the compilers are huge, ugly and slow. Line for line, a Java app might be 20% slower than a C app, but algorithms define the speed of code and as Anders Hejlsberg said of .Net, a VM is the best use of Moore’s to come around in a long time. There are many huge benefits to modern languages but the biggest is that a developer is up to 10x more productive. I won’t argue that kernel mode code should be written in Java–yet–but the kernel is only a small portion of a distro and much of the other code could easily be.

I think Scott McNealy should be fired by Sun’s Board of Directors for his poor stewardship of Java (I run more C# apps than Java apps on Ubuntu!) but in the meanwhile, you should encourage code to be written in any managed language: Perl, Python, PHP, Java, C#, etc. Less VMs is definitely better, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube and multiple VMs aren’t a serious cost.

Fini
Some of this may be silly, obvious or other, but I offer it humbly as food for thought to an organization who has built something big and important, all of which prepares it well for the many exciting developments ahead.

Update: I also wrote an Open Letter to Ubuntu’s leader Mark Shuttleworth, talking to him about Ubuntu’s challenges.

I am an ex-Microsoft programmer of 10 years who hadn’t spent 10 minutes with any Open Source code till I left Microsoft–which is actually very typical for MS employees.

After leaving 1 year ago and spending it with Linux (most of that time with Ubuntu) I’ve gained tremendous respect for the Open Source world as a whole but more than that, had an epiphany that Linux on the desktop is 99.999% ready to go. Linux is lean, stable, polished and extremely rich. All of the pieces needed for world domination on the desktop are there. If every Microsoft employee installed Linux, the attrition rate would double–which would be considered a catastrophe. If Bill Gates were to install Linux, he’d hire someone to smash one of his plasma TVs.

When I first investigated Linux, many of the obvious stuff I thought would be problems were not:

• Linux supports a wide variety of PC devices. The driver support in Linux is as least as good as Windows and must represent an enormous effort by a veritable army of programmers.
• The modern GUIs have all the nice features you’d expect: a clean, rich, stable, customizable & dynamic shell, consistency and interoperability among applications, and administrative UIs for all essential features.
• Linux supports laptops now with sleep & hibernate, power management, Wi-Fi, external monitors, ability to plugin USB keys and cameras, Cleartype (LCD sub-pixel smoothing), etc.
• Linux has all the important apps: FireFox, Thunderbird/Evolution, OpenOffice, GAIM, games, accessories and multimedia apps.
• Excellent interoperability with Windows: SAMBA file sharing, Office file-format interop, WMA/WMV codecs, dual-boot, NTFS resize on install, MSN IM protocol support, WINE, and probably much more I haven’t discovered yet.

In fact, Linux hasn’t just reached parity with Windows, it has significant functionality that Window doesn’t have:

• Linux distributions contain thousands of applications and installing them requires just 1 click. The market for 3rd party apps on Linux is much healthier than the 3rd-party market on Windows today and it is almost all free! Computing has become fun again because I can download all kinds of cool tools and instantly start learning and creating.
• I never run into walls with the ability to grep through essential system logs, tweak and re-compile code, google the actual development design discussions, jump into a rich command shell, have lots of choices for tools when one doesn’t meet my needs because of either bugs or missing features, and I can browse excellent support forums. My mom won’t use all those options but they are great to have.

An important point here is that Linux already has all the needed desktop features. What is holding it back is not features anymore, but bugs. Here are a few of the bugs that I see on my one English install: (UPDATE: I could probably file 50 bugs if I had the time and expertise and had a clean room setup to repro them in)

• Multimedia often skips or doesn’t display properly in the browser
• Sleep and hibernate don’t work on my hardware yet
• Gnome will mount NTFS, and create an icon on my desktop, but I can’t browse it because of permission problems
• Enabling external monitors isn’t easy
• Remote printing requires manual textfile configuration
• Installing non-free software or drivers requires lots of manual work
• Driver bugs, some hangs and crashes
• apt-get dist-upgrade hosed my machine (had to do a fresh install)
• ogg-vorbis is 5x slower at encoding a CD compared to Windows Media

These things are problems, but most are really just bugs. For example, the kernel and shell UI support hibernation, but it doesn’t yet work on many laptops–each problematic chipset is a bug. Gnome can detect and mount my NTFS partition and it actually understands the complicated NTFS format, but I am forced to jump to the command line to view my files. These problems can usually be worked around by a Linux guru but they shouldn’t exist and in many cases are just tiny bugs breaking a scenario from being easy.

My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn’t have anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first. At Microsoft, we had Program Managers and one of their responsibilities was to be customer advocates to prioritize the bugs for the devs to fix. In many open source groups, it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work on it, not because an important user scenario is broken. The Wi-Fi tool was broken in Gnome for many months, but the bugs just sat there languishing in the database. Microsoft or Apple would not have shipped a Wi-Fi UI that was completely broken in that way.

I believe the Linux development process overall is working just fine, shipping high quality code on a regular basis, so I think the problem is simply an issue of socalization. Many bug databases allow people to vote for bugs, and that might be an interesting democratic way to go about it, but I also think that having more focus and vocal user advocates would be enough.

One of the reasons why I like Ubuntu is that because it is being run on a wide variety hardware by newbies like me, it is building up a knowledgebase of these issues.

How much needs to be done? My estimate is that Ubuntu needs on the order of 10,000 bugs to be fixed to get that last .001%. If you want to make your own number, here one place to start: Ubuntu bugs. How long will that take? If we assume it takes 1 day per bug, then 10,000 bugs is 50 man-years. By Microsoft standards, 50 man-years is tiny: Windows Vista will probably have 5000 man-years of effort beyond Windows XP. In other words 10,000 bugs is 1% of the effort MS will spend on Vista.

The bad news is that while 50 man-years is small, it is still large for an organization like Ubuntu which I estimate has the equivalent of 30 full-time devs. In addition, many of their bugs exist in other codebases manned by volunteers.

How and when those bugs get fixed, or whether another distro will get there first, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader, but I do feel that the big guys should jump in a bit and help out. IBM claims to be a big supporter of Linux, but their employees all run Windows, which shows you what they think about Linux on the desktop. It is a shame because IBM could lose 50 employees under the cushions of their couch.

Linux on the desktop is very, very close and can happen as soon as we want it to.

Update: Only 21 Diggs—Digg it?

Update 2: The 10,000 bugs number is just a back of the envelope calculation. I looked at the Ubuntu bug database, but also at the kernel, Gnome, and OpenOffice bug databases as well. I looked at Debian’s ‘Release-Critical’ bugs, but think I could ship with all of them–there may be wisdom with Ubuntu just snapshotting Debian-unstable to start a new release.

I actually think fixing just the right 1,000 bugs would move it forward a huge amount for me at least, but I still imagine that running Ubuntu on 100 million different desktops around the world would bring out more issues with a much wider variety of hardware, software, .DOC files, other writing scripts, etc.

Another approach: I think I could file 50 Ubuntu bugs, yet I don’t believe that my testing is 1/20th of the Ubuntu codebase but I do imagine that it is at least 1/200th.

When I realized that Ubuntu is just getting going, that many people don’t file bugs, and that 10,000 bugs is a relatively small number, I quit work on estimating. If Ubuntu could fix the right 10,000 bugs, it would be a superb system indeed.

Update 3: I just posted an Open Letter to the new Debian Project Leader about the ‘complicated’ relationship between Debian and Ubuntu.

No team won the two prizes for the tether and climber contests in NASA & Spaceward Foundation’s recent Space Elevator contest which is a shame because there have been a lot of news articles about it.

However, this contest seems designed by a marketing person to generate news articles, a grad student version of a soapbox derby, not to advance human understanding in any of the challenges in building a space elevator. For example, the current standard to beat in the tether contest is Spectra Fiber which is a polyethelene plastic; nanotechnology is nowhere to be found.

The Space Elevator guys hope for favorable comparisons to the X-Prize, though in fact the contests are very different. The X-Prize contest had winnings which were 100x greater, was a true contest with no timeline (this contest was announced in March) and completing the contest required man-years of work instead of just a few months by small teams. In short: if grad students in Canada can do well, then the problem is not hard enough. 🙂

In both cases, however, it isn’t clear that humanity has learned anything from the contests. Boeing isn’t going to have its top engineers rip SpaceShipOne apart like they would with a flying saucer or some other invention which was a true breakthrough; in fact SpaceShipOne is on its way to the National Air and Space Museum–to excite future generations if not be useful to this one. Perhaps the biggest thing learned from the X-Prize is that you only need an R&D budget of $26 million, not billions of dollars, to build a spaceship, but that is a testament to the sophistication of modern manufacturing techniques, not to the SpaceShipOne itself.

However, even if the X-Prize is mostly an engineering task, it was a significant one. The Space Elevator contest involves tackling only 2 small challenges and by having teams all working on the exact same small problem makes it the equivalent of research pork.

How about instead a contest where teams can attack any problem in building a space elevator and money would go to that which advanced our knowledge most? Different teams would focus on different problems: how lightning affects the tether, research into epoxies, the affects of radiation and high-speed objects, geographic research into the best places to anchor elevators, any aspect of space hotels or space tourism, work on adaptive optics, MPDs, robotics and software, etc., etc. The Space Elevator book is currently the best compedium of solutions to many of the challenges in building a space elevator, but the book exudes future challenges!

The current Space Elevator contest is a 20th-century contest for a 21st-century problem. It becomes harder to judge such a contest, but then lets just get smarter judges! More importantly, it becomes much more likely that people will solve real problems that mankind hasn’t solved before and therefore be worthy of the news it will generate. Unleash our ingenuity!

Seattle, A Hotbed For Space Elevator Development?

KC: My jaw dropped when I went to my nearest Starbucks, saw your artwork on the wall, and realized that you lived in Seattle. How long have you been here? It doesn’t exactly seem to be a hotbed for space elevator work…

BE: I did my work for NIAC (NASA Institute For Advanced Concepts) here in 2000, and then moved back in June. I was working with people everywhere; most of the collaboration was virtual, and many folks I didn’t meet until the end. I don’t think I met Eric Westling until after we published our book (The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System). A few people I’m currently working with I still haven’t met. I don’t work with people just because they’re local, I have to find people I think are the best. It depends on what I’m working on. It’s an effort that can be largely broken up into sections. “Here is the anchor station, go do it.”? Actually, it’s great that I don’t have to have everyone in the same room because it’s just not possible.

I tried to look up your biography on the Internet, and couldn’t track down some of the organizations you’ve worked in. Some of them are probably from the early Internet days…

We’ve been trying to get various projects started. A few were a few false starts, or in some cases just testing the waters. HighLift Systems was a Seattle-based company, and was one of those false starts. I closed it down. I’m not affiliated with LiftPort. I have worked with LiftPort’s founder Michael Laine a bit at HighLift in Seattle before we parted ways. [Not on the best of terms; juicy but unsubstantiated gossip about LiftPort removed, Meow!! –ed]

NASA Versus Private Industry

Did you see Michael Griffin’s interview in USA Today last week?

No, but I know the general gist. It’s not a surprise. In my mind the Space Shuttle and Space Station are not valuable efforts. It’s not what NASA should be doing. NASA is using technology from commercial enterprises, or very old technology from the 70’s to try and do space exploration. If they are going to be a real premier space agency, they need to be pushing it.

They should be doing stuff which looks to us like science fiction…

It shouldn’t be science fiction, but they should be pushing the boundaries and doing work that inspires. That’s what Apollo was. The technology for Apollo existed before the program started; they took that knowledge and pushed it to its limits, and it literally inspired the world.

I wasn’t around then, but it seems like peoplecared what NASA did back then. NASA has their Moon and Mars pictures up on their website, but I don’t know if anyone cares. If you squint as you look, you’d think it was 1970.

It is history; it’s old news. And since then, they’ve done very little.

It seems like there was a long-standing debate between rockets and the Space Shuttle. From where you sit, that’s like choosing between Nicki and Paris Hilton.

Even high up in NASA management, they won’t officially say it – but they have said it directly to me – that nothing substantial in space can be done with rockets. A federal program with lots of money can take some people up there, but it won’t be able to commercialize space. We’ve been going at it for thirty-five years now, and we’ve put up telecommunications systems and GPS. If there’s a buck to be made and a product to be built, it’ll get done. With current technology, I think we’ve developed space commercially as far as we can. We need something dramatically different—a brand new market, a brand new technology.

Economists should get that. How did trains and highways change America?

Private enterprise is starting to get it. NASA hasn’t shown much interest on the space elevator, but there are a number of private entities that have.

But we just laughed at a bunch of them: HighLift, LiftPort. Do any of them have billions of dollars?

There are real people with money and the know-how. To get it going you don’t need ten billion dollars. You’ll need a couple of billion up front, and a lot can be financed. For example, instead of money changing hands, you could approach Hyundai and, ignoring the issues of dealing with a foreign company, offer them 10% of the company. They could then supply the anchor station and the climbers or whatever. Either they as a company would invest, or maybe the government of South Korea would invest. But dealing with South Korea would bring up all kinds of technology transfer export issues which may make it unfeasible – perhaps a company like Exxon might be approachable. Private individuals, financial groups – there are a lot of people who could step up.

In principle, we shouldn’t be waiting for our government to throw big money at it.

No, no. We are getting a few million to develop the last needed parts of the technology, developing the high-strength materials needed, creating a Research and Development center, performing other engineering work, cleaning up some of the loose ends, and doing some promotional work to let people know the concept exists and where we are at with it. Money could be leveraged to get more development done until the risks are reduced; then we can approach the real people with money.

A space elevator seems like a task of the same complexity as the Apollo mission was, and maybe private enterprise could have tackled even that project. Perhaps the 21st century is different, but it seems like a task as big as that would require government’s involvement.

It is similar in size to that, but it’s also similar in size to the Boston Big Dig. It’s small compared to, say, rebuilding New Orleans in money or effort. There’s different technology and risks than the Apollo mission presented, but the full effort and capabilities aren’t that different.

The Apollo program didn’t have a commerical endpoint. It set a goal of putting a man on the moon, which it was an enormous engineering effort. But the space elevator is a commercial effort. The Apollo, the Shuttle, the Space Station were never that.

They certainly sold us on that vision…

They sold us on that vision, but it was never that way, which is unfortunate.

You present a vision in which we don’t need NASA. Perhaps that’s true, but if what NASA‘s doing isn’t useful to us, can they be refocused to help us? Is that a goal for you? Is it possible?

I’m not working toward that. I worked at Los Alamos and I’ve seen how NASA operates. Their primary goal is not the development of space. They are a space agency, but they are very political. It’s a political organization; it’s a federal agency. Even if one of the NASA centers became completely useless, it wouldn’t get closed down because there are thousands of jobs there.

They’re a huge organization and they’re doing lots of things.

Yes, and that means they can’t be focused. They can’t trim off something to go do something else. Their hands are very well tied because of the requirements of the real world and society’s constraints of what they can and cannot do.

I look at NASA as a company doing lots of interesting things. I can’t say whether ramjets and so forth is interesting, but it is research, and it’s their mission. So what part would you cut?

That’s exactly it – what part would be cut. For NASA to go off and do something new and different, they’d have to take people or build a virtual organization from all the different centers and work together, which is very difficult. So they’d have to start a new center because it’s difficult to reorganize or refocus the old stuff. It’s the same with the national labs.

So are you resigned to the fact that Michael Griffin’s successor is going to do another mea-culpa in 20 years? The space elevator will be flying on by, and NASA will be stuck with their tiny little rockets and lunar landers.

Well, NASA will continue to do what they’ve always done, which is to provide employment.

Employment?

That’s their primary goal. They can do research, and the space elevator would open up new areas for them to do cutting-edge research. In some cases they really are; in other cases, they are sort of floundering about trying be something that they aren’t. With a space elevator, NASA could build probes that they weren’t able to do before; they could do new research on different applications of the space elevator and new applications of space, but unfortunately NASA has trouble just doing the main infrastructure and large program pieces.

But they did build the Apollo, and the Space Shuttle is a tremendous achievement.

It is, but NASA is a different organization today. The Shuttle was designed in the 1970s, right after Apollo. Today, you have a very different organization with different capabilities.

But I don’t know if they’ve completely lost ‘the right stuff.’ They can maintain it, and they do understand it. Hasn’t that knowledge and experience been transferred from engineer to engineer? In the software world, there’s code rot because everyone who has worked on the code has since gone elsewhere.

They can maintain it because it’s all built up. They started the Shuttle in the 1970’s when NASA was still new and flexible enough to move into new areas and design a new program such as the Shuttle. Also it wasn’t far enough from Apollo that they could take people from there and go do it. Now, however, the idea of taking a fair chunk of people with very different expertise and focusing them on one mission is very difficult.

Apollo was fantastic. The Shuttle is an amazing machine. I look at the space elevator and think of it as doable, but by the same token I look at the Shuttle and ask myself how it could possibly be built. There are 3 million parts, it’s exremely complex, and it does work.

Do you think they have the technical skills anymore?

They have so many people with so many different skills – if you tried to put them all on the space elevator project, there would be a fair fraction of people that wouldn’t find a role.

NASA could just create new teams and move appropriate people over. I jumped from group to group in a software company, each time learning a new skillset…

Yes, but if you had a group of, say, geologists, would you put them on carbon nanotubes??

Okay, then, the space elevator doesn’t have work for them. You would let them continue their research.

But there are geologists and plasma physicists and people who design gamma ray detectors – all of these people have niches, some of which would be helpful, but a lot are simply overkill for what we need. They are studying planets and the moon and Mars and asteroids and such, but the organization is just hard to fit into a whole new entity. It would be like asking NASA to go and build ocean-going ships. You just can’t refocus an entire organization such as NASA.

Going back to rockets is a still big step for NASA. Perhaps you could say that forty years on and all they’re doing is updating the software, but even that is a large engineering effort.

There are real problems with that. If they were to start a new program to build a new launch vehicle (which is what they should be doing), grabbing an F-1 rocket for the new venture is reverting back to 1950’s technology. They are still going to have to redesign it, because that ‘50’s technology is no longer valid today. Why not start from scratch and do the best you can? In the end, NASA is still living with rockets, and it won’t turn into a self-sustaining endeavor. It will end as soon as the government funding is shut off, which it will be eventually. Administrations change and the world changes – eventually something else will happen that preoccupies the Administration, and they’ll say “We are done with this.”?

I think Bush thinks big enough to spend the political capital and billions of dollars, but you never know with future Presidents.

Yes, you’ll never know about the next one, or the next one after that.

I thought I remembered hearing about Mars and the date 2040, but I looked around and couldn’t find anything.

There isn’t a defined timetable beyond 2020, and that’s already four Administrations away.

We’ll still have John Roberts… One thing I’ve thought about is how rockets have made people lose faith in the mission. People look at the moon and say “F*ck it, why should we bother, we just got out of a gravity well.”? Our current technology limits our thinking about what’s possible and reasonable.

The moon is an ambition, but not a valuable end unto itself. If you’re going to go to the moon you need a goal, like setting up a base, or mining the moon, or installing solar power arrays or something.

I think Bush believes that it’s a 384,000 km warmup lap for everything else, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Well, then the question is, “Why are you going to Mars?”?

We’ve always known that going to Mars is a good thing! We are just now coming to realize that going to the moon isn’t. We used to think the moon was a good thing.

Going to the Mars is a very complex endeavor, so you need to have a reason.

We’re convincing ourselves that going to the Moon isn’t a good thing, so convincing ourselves not to go to Mars seems to be next. At that point, no one will dream anymore.

If we are going to Mars just because it’s there, that’s not self-sustaining. It’s very likely that it will get killed once we’ve done it; then it will shut back down (just like Apollo) because it’s not self-sustaining. Then you go through the whole cycle again in another thirty years.

Someone from Slashdot made the comment that we’ll do this mission, pop open a brewski, and proclaim, “Yep, still got it.”?

Which brings up the problem that if China, South Korea or Europe plans out how to do it commercially, and for example gets infrastructures set up, then they’ll have a commercially self-sustaining enterprise which will spread out on its own, to the moon or Mars. That’s a real program, not pork.

It’s why countries came to North America. They didn’t come because the land existed, they came because of gold, furs, tobacco, lumber. If they had found barren rock, they would have just returned.

America as “the land of opportunity”? used to mean animals and trees…

And gold. Greed drives things. If we found something of value in space, and if someone thought they could make trillions of dollars from it, they would spend billions to go get it.

Alternative Energy Sources

You talk in your book about heavy Helium being a resource.

That section was primarily written by Eric Westling. It’s another resource in space that would require fusion technology to be developed further. If this technology became available, then we would need Helium-3.

Is this another example where our country is so politically backward with regards to nuclear technology that we just can’t take advantage of this resource yet?

Actually, I’m not sure if there’s been enough money in the right places to develop the technology. There are some efforts, but they may not be focused in the right directions. We should be working on this, because we are going to need it.

I read reports of more oil being discovered all the time, yet everyone believes we are going to run out, and so it’s very expensive.

There have been various studies done; the ones I believe say that in ten to fifteen years we are going to have real issues.

Saudi Arabia just recently doubled the amount of oil they thought they had in their reserves!

They’ve been doing that for years, upping their estimates on what they think they have, but they aren’t finding new oil.

You don’t think the environmental lobby has shut down research and exploitation of oil? It seems we aren’t allowed to drill anywhere or build new refineries, and now we wonder why it’s so expensive.

Most of the planet has been surveyed, and if there’s oil to be found, someone’s found it.

We’ve recently discovered these shale deposits…

Yes, but even beyond the cost of oil, there’s the cost of extraction, and if you have to dig up half of Canada to get to it, you’ll get to the point where it will take more energy to retrieve it than what you’ll get back from it. A colleague of mine spoke with Exxon, and some of their technical people said we have fifteen years.

There are pessimists everywhere. I know a bunch.

But Exxon is an oil company and they should be the optimists. The point in all of this is that we don’t know. It could be ten years, it could be fifty. We don’t have the information that’s needed, and someone needs to be pushing for it.

We will always have doubts until we go into space and realize the resources out there are infinite. There’s tons of solar energy and nuclear energy. Your book talks a lot about energy.

With the space elevator, we can create a huge solar array. We’ll tap into this energy, and it won’t run out. We won’t have to deal with oil glitches and stock market glitches and potential environmental glitches.

I’ve thought about solar arrays, and I’ve wondered whether E=mc² proves we should be utilizing nuclear power because it’s easier to transport mass than energy.

That’s great, too. We can do nuclear power – if you have the fuel and make it safe so it doesn’t glitch – then you’ll have the energy.

Space And The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism

It’s a post-9/11 world, and everyone now realizes the threat of terrorism. If our government said that we should build it on land to protect it, is that possible? If we build more than one, why worry so much about where the first one is?

The reason we picked that position, straight down from California, is because there are no hurricanes, no lightning, no winds, and it’s out of the way. Someone flying an airplane will be spotted 400 miles away.

That would require a huge amount of infrastructure. Protecting something in Nevada, we’re set up to do.

You still have people driving the roads through there, hanging around outside Area 51, and so there would be the potential for terrorists to strike with shoulder-fired missiles. The U.S. pretty much controls the oceans – we have a heck of a Navy. Any incoming airplane could be easily shot down way before it became a threat. The middle of the ocean is very secure. With land, you have to secure the roads, clear out the access.

It is inaccessible, therefore making it more expensive to get people there.

Initially it would be cargo that’s needed, and the cheapest way to move something is on a ship – one ship out of Seattle could contain enough climbers to keep the space elevator going for a year.

It would depend on the infrastructure and how many experts and support staff you have on site to keep it running. What if you needed a million square feet?

We aren’t talking about thousands of people. Sea Launch has tens of people.

Tens? What if we needed a thousand people?

If you need a thousand people, then you would need a cruise ship, or more floating platforms, supply ships, etc.

If we are going to build more than one, are they all going to be located in the same place? Asia will get one eventually, if they don’t get one first.

You could put a number of them in the same place, but once we start building and understanding them better, we can put them on land as well as in other locations. You could put one in parts of Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia. After we build the first one and have a better understanding of what’s going on, we’ll have a lot more options with subsequent ones.

Elevator Thrust

MPDs seem like a good idea to power the climbers because they are seventeen times more efficient than chemical rockets.

It’s electric propulsion. They’ve been developed and tested in various labs including at Princeton and some labs in Moscow. They have been developed at pretty much the size we would need, and they can be run for five hundred hours without degradation. The space elevator doesn’t require MPDs; chemical rockets could be used but they’re less efficient. On the other hand, it takes much longer to get from low earth orbit to high earth orbit with MPDs; – rockets are much faster, you just flip the switch and they head on their way. So there are some tradeoffs with each.

Both need fuel.

With MPDs, we talk about beaming them up.

Err, you would need something which shoots out the back, even if it doesn’t combust.

Yes, propellant. They accelerate faster than what you get out of chemical rockets, which is why it’s more efficient.

We’ll Need to Get India Working On a New Kama Sutra

Your book talks about a hotel in 0.1 g space…

Probably the first efforts in tourism will be a climber with glass windows. You could put forty people on and charge them $20,000 – $30,000. They’ll go up a couple of hundred miles, have dinner, spend eight hours, and then come back down. That could be a very good market for the elevator.

Next, you could expand upon the living quarters up in geosynchronous orbit (GEO). The solar power arrays and satellites will be up there, so the infrastructure and crews will be needed to maintain them, and so forth. One of the problems will be the radiation belt between here and there, so the transportation would need to be sped up, or the radiation shields improved. If you are sending up tourists they’ll want to be comfortable, so you either need more shielding or it has to be faster.

Space tourism will be limited by the long trip to GEO.

The space elevator has been planned around current technology in which speed is mostly a function of power. Once the elevator is built, people will be working on improving its speed, and will improve other areas and shrink the transport time from eight days to one; thus radiation becomes less of an issue. You will have to design the climbing system and the treads such that they won’t be damaged at higher speeds. Tourism is viable in the long-term, but these issues have to be dealt with first. It’s not the first market, but it will happen.

Two hundred miles up (about where the Space Station orbits) is a lot closer than 14,000 km up, where your book talks about at which, with the speed of your climbers, is seventy hours of travel.

14,000 km up is right in the middle of the radiation belt, so you don’t want to go there. You could build a hotel hanging on the ribbon. Alternatively, you could just have a car which is self-contained. Forty people, three trips per day, and $20,000 per person would make it viable. A second elevator would cost one-third as much as the first, so it becomes doable.

You wouldn’t build it like the ISS (International Space Station) where people get out and meet up with the hotel?

To do that, you’d need a rocket to catch up, and then use it for coming back down. Then, you’d just have a re-entry probe.

Why not just do the reverse?

A re-entry problem would be easier. There are lots of different options. You wouldn’t need to get out of the elevator though. It would take a few hours to get up there, and it would be enjoyable from the moment you left till you got back. The whole time spent is enjoyable without getting off the elevator.

Lunar Elevator?

Okay, so we have the space elevator. To get to the Moon, we’d build a lunar elevator?

Jerome Pearson has been talking about that idea. I’m not a big fan of the lunar elevator because there are a lot of complications and fewer economic reasons. Asteroids are a lot easier to put elevators on. We can do that with current materials if we have an economic reason to do it. The moon is a little more difficult because of its slow rotation. Asteroids and Mars are easier, but what will drive the project is the economic return. It also depends on what the goal is. If all of our activities are on the moon, then that’s where we go. If we are going to Mars, then we go there next. If we are mining asteroids, then we will be sending elevators to all the asteroids we can get to.

I’m not sure if we need to be mining asteroids yet…

I don’t think it’s a near-term opportunity. I think it’s something which will happen eventually, when we have a lot of other projects going on in space. The first projects will be solar-powered satellites and telecommunications.

Nanotechnology

Everyone focuses on nanotechnology as being the only challenge, but really its only the first. President Bush has increased spending by 83% for it since 2001. It seems like we must be on the cusp of something.

There’s what’s called the National Nanotechnology Initiative. When I was looking into it, the budget was a billion dollars. But when you look closer at it, it is split up between a dozen agencies, and within each agency it’s split again into a dozen different areas – much of it ends up as SBIRs and STTRs and turned into $100,000 grants. We looked into it with regards to carbon nanotube composites, and it appeared that about thirty million dollars was going into high-strength materials – and a lot of that was being spent internally in a lot of the agencies, in the end there’s only a couple of million dollars out of the billion dollar budget going into something that would be useful to us.

It’s pork. It doesn’t have focus.

It doesn’t have focus, and it’s spread out to include everything. You get a little bit of effort in a thousand different places.

You wonder whether the efforts are duplicative…

A lot of the budget is spent on one entity trying to play catch-up with whoever is leading. Instead of funding the leader, they’re funding someone else internally to catch up.

Payload Physics

Talk a bit about bootstrapping payloads to a twenty-ton elevator, and what would be next after that. I worry that starting with twenty tons would be a bottleneck, even though it’s two orders of magnitude greater than what NASA can do today, given the time it would take to build an elevator.

A two hundred ton elevator will become reasonable and commercially viable once we get the costs to where we believe they are going to be. We chose twenty tons, as this is what we know will be the first viable step. Thirteen tons is a good payload on a 20-ton climber, and will prove to be very valuable. What happens after that – well, we can plan all we want. When the first one starts operating, then there’ll be somebody saying, “ two hundred tons is great, but we need three hundred tons, and it has to do this, and this, and this…”?

But each order of magnitude is a milestone in itself, and so we need to start at the right place.

Yes, but the basic physics don’t change, and the operations don’t change. To give some perspective, two hundred tons is like the size of a large commercial aircraft. We can build a climber that size, and a ribbon that will hold it. It’s all things that can be done. Ramping up to that size is a matter of will; there aren’t any physical constraints.

Waiting For Our Overlords To Wake Up

This interview is depressing. We haven’t broken ground and it isn’t clear if NASA could be helpful.

From the inside, we’ve got a lot of things going on, even though we haven’t started construction. That book of mine came out a couple of years ago; before that, space elevators were the stuff of science fiction. We’ve gone from science fiction to this idea showing up in a lot of places – various magazines and in real serious discussions in mainstream forums. It’s showing up in high-level discussions at NASA and European Space Agencies and other places like that. We also have a lot of efforts which aren’t solidified yet, but if if any one of of them comes through, we’ll be on a real good track to make this idea happen.

Living in the 21^st century, fifteen years just seems too long. It’s like saying that it’s going to take fifteen years to rebuild the Gulf coast after Katrina.

There are limits on how fast you can do things. But if we got more money, it can go faster. I’m a scientist so it’s my nature to be realistic. The project has a couple of years of development and the assumed hurdles with regulatory committees, as well as going out for bids on contracts.

None of that’s engineering though. If you killed all the lawyers and bureaucrats, how long would it really take?

When we’re finished with the development, we would still have some work on the materials yet to complete. If we really pushed everything, we could get it up and running in five or six years. That’s pretty tight. Our estimates are seven or eight years, but if we really pushed it it could happen sooner. It would take a couple of years to build things, and then a couple more to increase the strength of the elevator. But one could use more launches or bigger launches to get a bigger first ribbon to cut back on things a bit. There are things you can do to tighten up the schedule, but I’m trying to be a realist. If you promise something in five years, then five years later you’d better have something. Large infrastructure and power plants take time to get built.

The money will eventually come. With a space elevator, the day you build it and the first elevator you send up, the value of the company will easily become ten times what was put into it, with just the market that’s available; and that’s assuming you don’t do anything intelligent like build the next one at a much lower cost, or develop new commercial applications, etc.

You’re basically saying that if we could launch ten times more stuff into space than we do today, we would still max out that capacity…

Once you’ve got the elevator, you’re able to transport lots of stuff up there. The company that operates the space elevator could then put up the telecommunications satellite, and become the telecommunications owner for the whole planet. Then they could put up solar-powered satellites and own the power producing capability for the planet. That’s a ridiculous amount of money and power involved. And if they really wanted to go hog-wild they could say “You know what? We are just going to take Mars! We are the only ones who can get there.”? At some point the implications get crazy. So yes, there will be a pretty big return on it once it gets built.

Software Versus Hard Ware

A lot of space elevator supporters are software geeks. Any thoughts for them?

There are a lot of software challenges involved. The system isn’t a whole lot different, but there are new uses being created for robotics and autonomous operations. I think a lot of that is currently being developed for factories. There’s more need for robotics, but I think the software requirements will keep up.

You should be worried about it! The Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers nearly died because of software bugs, and the Denver Airport’s luggage system failed because of software. I suppose God has provided harder physics problems than software problems in the short-term.

We’re always going to have software glitches, therefore we have to plan for them. But the elevator will allow us to send up whatever computers we want. It doesn’t have to be a specific little piece of software for a specific piece of hardware, like what was designed for the Mars mission. A space elevator can use software that has been tested by a million people.

The Trillion Dollar Question

I think you should have your Natan Sharansky moment with President Bush…

There’s been discussions, and hopefully the twenty books you’ve sent him will spur them into giving me a call. A lot of this is just getting into the front door. I’ve briefed all levels of NASA except for the administrator in the past, but I haven’t really tried to recently because we’ve got a lot of activities going on and I don’t know where NASA would play a role.

One challenge we face is that if NASA gets involved, it can tie up the technology development. If government funds it, then government owns it – you may lose control of the technology which could be valuable to private enterprises. We have to be careful how we set everything up to avoid burning bridges.

What I think is going to happen is that someone will develop the first elevator. After that, there’ll be a rush to build five more. You can run off a list of who will be building it: DoD (Department Of Defense) will want one, a couple of private entities will want one, the Europeans will want one. Those five will be built independently of who builds the first one, whether it’s the US, China, private enterprise… Regardless, the next five will be built. After that we lose complete control; they get bigger, they get more of them. We’re only worried about building the first one.

This is an enormous industry which needs to develop. I come from the IT industry, and I think of this as something on that order of magnitude.

It is literally a multi-trillion dollar per year industry. There are real markets that you can run the numbers for, and it’s well over a trillion – that’s just launch revenues. Add on top of that the value of the products that will be launched.

I think this picture summarizes why we shouldn’t follow NASA’s vision. There are a couple of guys, a cute little space ship, and an American flag…

Or, we can have a city up there. I sent a proposal to NASA which cut the cost of the moon-Mars initiative in half, and what it ended up being was a settlement of 100 people on the moon and Mars with all kinds of infrastructure and supply depots and everything else – the money wasn’t being spent on the launches.

It would be great if we could get NASA involved but I don’t know where they would fit, and I don’t feel obligated to get them to fit. If private enterprise comes up and says here’s the money, lets go do it, then we should do it. There’s a whole lot more money in the private side of our economy than the public side. So if a project comes up which has a good business case, then private enterprise will get right on it. In terms of resources that NASA could reallocate, it’s pretty limited. A lot of their resources are tied up, unless they were to shut down one of their centers. The billion dollars a year they’re spending on is all they could scrape together without firing people.

I talked with Michael Griffin many years ago and he’s a very interesting individual. I may go talk to him at some point again, and see where things might fit, but currently I’ve got my hands full with other avenues that look promising. I’ve been briefing NASA on a regular basis for a couple of years, and not much has come out of it. I’ve started talking to private industry and things happen a lot more quickly, so naturally I’ve gone down that route. With NASA, you can fight just to get a $100,000 grant.

Spoken with Arthur C. Clarke lately?

I’ve sent a few e-mails to him and he’s written me a couple of notes. He’s very supportive of our ideas. He just wrote a letter to the London Times regarding NASA and space elevators. That’s where he mentions that his fifty-year target has dropped to twenty-five years. He spoke at one of our conferences as well, in which he said it would be ten years, so he’s changed it a few times. He’s been a good supporter. In fact, we have a lot of people who are good supporters. It’s amazing how far things have come in the last five years or so…

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