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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (48311)	3/18/2006 6:44:39 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 116555

Profits set to soar in outer space money.cnn.com Prepare for liftoff: The space business may be the most incredible new opportunity of your lifetime. By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine February 27, 2006: 3:39 PM EST ... The shuttle and the international space station continued this record of dismal return on investment. Small wonder, then, that most private-sector investors have focused instead on more earthly pursuits. Only one thing will prod us into the cold, hard vacuum of space, and that's the prospect of earning cold, hard cash. Fortunately, there's now a lot of that to go around. Worldwide government spending on space is soaring to $50 billion a year, a 25 percent jump over 2000. NASA represents only $16 billion of that total, but during the next 20 years, the U.S. space agency is likely to sign contracts totaling as much as $400 billion to launch a human mission to Mars. We are also well into the commercial space age. In 1998, private-sector spending on space applications began to exceed government spending, and the gap is widening. A critical mass of entrepreneurs -- some with familiar names like Bezos and Branson -- have been backing space-related companies for years. In the coming months, their efforts will reach blastoff stage (quite literally). Some of the markets they're targeting, like the $4 billion satellite launch business being pursued by PayPal founder Elon Musk, are ripe for competition. But most, such as suborbital tourism, space hotels, and solar satellites, don't yet exist. All, however, have the potential to generate astronomical returns during the next decade. Building infrastructure is the first step, and here historical analogies abound. The federal government is poised to begin contracting with the private sector to deliver cargo into orbit, a trend that could nurture a market for civilian spaceflight in much the same way that airmail contracts from the Post Office spurred the development of civil aviation a century ago. Prize money -- the incentive that launched Charles Lindbergh -- is now being offered for everything from building a machine to extract oxygen from lunar soil ($250,000) to building an aircraft capable of delivering tourists to orbit by 2010 ($50 million). Meanwhile, new technologies are opening up new possibilities. Consider the space elevator, which is enabled by the advent of lightweight carbon nanotubes; a 62,000-mile elevator to the heavens would reduce orbital freight costs by 98 percent and open up space just as the railroads opened up the Wild West. The long-term possibilities are even more celestial. Ever heard of 3554 Amun? It's a space rock about 2 kilometers in diameter that looks as if it might have fallen straight out of The Little Prince. There are three key things to know about 3554 Amun: First, its orbit crosses that of Earth; second, it's the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroid yet discovered; and finally, it contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinumlike metals. In other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates. And if you time your journey right -- 2020 looks promising -- it's easier to reach than the Moon.

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (48311)	3/18/2006 6:48:24 PM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116555

The 62,000-Mile Elevator Ride money.cnn.com Rockets are old news. The hottest idea in space enterprise is a tether to take us all the way from Earth to orbit. Meet the startups that think they can make it happen. By Georgia Flight March 17, 2006: 3:24 PM EST (Business 2.0) - Every world-changing wonder has to begin somewhere. But it would be hard for the space elevator to have a less auspicious start than it got last October in a foggy office parking lot in Mountain View, Calif. This was the setting for the first Space Elevator Games, sponsored by NASA, which offered a $200,000 prize to the first team that could make a machine climb up a 164-foot tether, powered by nothing but a mirror and a beam of light from a 10,000-watt bulb. In fact, none of the home-brewed contraptions on display could reach higher than 40 feet. The device that got the most attention was built by Vince Lopresti, a wheelchair-bound Texan, and that's because he made it from an old wheelchair frame. Ask him why he did it, and he gazes skyward. "I'm doing it to get off this rock," he says with a smile. The theory behind the elevator is simple. First proposed 111 years ago by a Russian scientist, it was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke in his award-winning 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, and goes like this: Earth is constantly spinning. So if you attach a counterweight to it with a cable, and put it far enough away--62,000 miles--the cable will be held taut by the force of the planet's rotation, just as if you spun around while holding a ball on a string. And if you've got a taut cable, you've got the makings of an elevator. As strange as that sounds--push the "Up" button, climb in, and soar off into weightless bliss--don't be surprised if it happens. The space elevator is where the PC was in the 1960s: The theory is solid, the materials exist, and people in garages are starting to tinker with the next step. Two Seattle startups are competing to build the elevator. Both believe they can do it within 15 years at a cost of $10 billion. NASA and China's space agency are eager to help make it happen. And no wonder: A working elevator would reduce the cost of launching anything into space by roughly 98 percent. The $500 million it takes to launch the average satellite (insurance not included) would be a thing of the past. Business won't have seen anything like it since the railroad. "All of a sudden," says Brad Edwards, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist who founded Sedco, one of the startups, "space will be open for real activity." ... So why hasn't anyone tried to build one yet? Because the material needed for the ribbon didn't exist. Until 1991, no substance came close to being strong, lightweight, and durable enough to do the job. Then a Japanese scientist stumbled on an arrangement of carbon atoms that became the strongest material ever tested: carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes are as much as 100 times stronger than steel, yet weigh only a fifth as much. A handful of companies worldwide, like Carbon Nanotechnologies in Texas, Mitsui in Japan, and Nanoledge in France, are already producing purified nanotubes. The longest nanotubes yet produced measure only a few inches, but that doesn't prevent them from being ribbon-ready. "The nanotubes themselves don't need to be 62,000 miles long," Edwards says. "Cotton fibers aren't long enough to make your shirt--you bond them together." The real problem is that, at $500 per gram, nanotubes are currently too expensive, and worldwide production is estimated to be less than 100 pounds per day. That's why Michael Laine believes commercializing nanotubes is the key to building the elevator. Laine is a former Marine instructor and CEO of three Seattle tech startups. He was approached by Edwards in 2000, and together they started a company called HighLift. They split after three years, when Laine wanted to have an IPO sooner rather than later. He founded the LiftPort Group; Edwards founded Sedco. Now the two are pursuing the same goal on opposite sides of Puget Sound.