How one company is making space pay

MSNBC: One of the things that people have talked about, in terms of the space industry, is the search for a "killer app" that would bring the bottom line home to investors and potential customers. At one point, people expected that the satellite telecom revolution would be the killer app, but that fizzled.

Now people are talking about space tourism as the killer app. But if you're talking about an incremental approach to private space, I would assume you don't take that "killer app" view of how things will develop in the future.

Benson: Well, actually, to some extent I do. If you go back 25 years to the beginning of the microcomputer revolution, the microcomputers came first, and the killer apps came second. There were really three of them: It was spreadsheets, VisiCalc for example; word processing, WordStar for example, and databases, dBase2 for example. Those were the three killer apps that would run on a standalone microcomputer, and that individually or in some combination gave people incredible analytical and publishing capabilities that they had never had before.

That helped stimulate the requirement for more memory, more processing speed and then more peripheral devices beyond the 8-inch floppy with — what was it? — 60K of capacity. Now I've got a gigabyte of storage on my keychain.

It was the physical PC, which was not invented by IBM, but validated with the IBM name, because Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were already manufacturing Apple IIs in their garage. That became a fad and a cult on the Apple computer side, but then it became big business over on the IBM clone side.

So the three applications that I mentioned before were the killer apps. And it was really the networking of the microcomputers that started challenging the mainframes — and put Wang out of business.

So right now, SpaceDev is more on the hardware side of developing the enabling technology, in terms of extremely high-performance, low-cost satellites. We've got a project right now at the Air Force Research Laboratory, that we call SSBT, small satellite bus technology. The whole purpose of this $750,000 program is to turn us loose in defining modular, plug-and-play, hardware- and software-oriented microsatellite buses. We are not only doing that, we are actually implementing it in our three Missile Defense Agency satellites.

These are truly plug and play. The subsystems will be interconnected with industry-standard interfaces — Ethernet, USB and RS422, take your choice. Guess what operating system we're running under? Linux. It's free! We're writing object-oriented software modules like device drivers.

One of the things were doing that’s fun is, with our little Air Force Research Lab contract, we're actually going to put together a satellite simulator that is a "flatsat" sitting on the tabletop. To prove the point, it's our intention to take this SimSat out to space conferences, have it right there in our exhibit booth, and challenge somebody to go over to Best Buy, buy some USB device, bring it into the conference, plug it in to our SimSat and let it run. When we get to that point, the capabilities of satellites will continue growing exponentially, the reliability is going to go up, and right now, we're maintaining a level cost. It's like when you go buy a PC every few years, you're paying about the same amount.

MSNBC: Right. You have a more capable computer, but the price is the same as it was for the less capable computer you bought three years ago.

Benson: Exactly. ... We haven’t even hit our stride yet, in terms of total plug-and-play modularity, but we will with the MDA satellites and other satellite products. So we're getting there.

MSNBC: But about the killer apps?

Benson: I think there are two potential ones. The first and more immediate one is human space transport. That's vitally needed. Well, let me back off: We don’t need it at all. There's no requirement for people to go to space. The international space station is up there, it's a huge expense, totally underutilized, we can hardly get people up there at all. And we certainly can't get enough up there to actually make it worthwhile for the investment that's been put into it.

We've got space tourists who are increasingly willing and able to spend at least $200,000. A hundred million to go to the moon? I wouldn't want to be the first one to try a technology like that, but someone may eventually do it.

Then there's Bigelow Aerospace: Bob Bigelow is a very serious, thoughtful, strategic thinker, and a highly accomplished businessman. I think his Transhab-based, inflatable modules are probably going to work and be cost-effective. He's going to need to get people up to them, and that's why he's offered the $50 million America's Space Prize.

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