To the casual observer, Hollywood would seem an unlikely locale for a conference about new commercial space applications.
     However, those who attended the fifth Space Frontier Conference at Hollywood's historic Roosevelt Hotel October 18-20 found a strong connection between Hollywood and commercial space efforts: both seek to make money from the entertainment and tourism industries.
     "Space: Your Ticket to Ride" focused on current efforts to develop low-cost access to space and the commercial markets best situated to support them while working largely outside the plans of NASA and other government space efforts.
     "The true breakout from this world will not begin in Washington," said Space Frontier Foundation president Rick Tumlinson.
     Instead, Tumlinson said, "we the people" can open the space frontier by developing new space markets and new ways to deliver cheap access to space.
     Two of the most promising markets discussed at the conference were space tourism and entertainment, with several companies presenting their plans to develop these markets.
     A "critical mass" of factors is starting to form for space tourism to be viable, according to Rand Simberg of Interglobal Space Lines. These factors include an aging American population with more discretionary income, growing global wealth, and a mature technology base.
     Simberg's company, which currently offers zero-g airplane flights, plans to expand to develop "upscale" space camps and eventually offer suborbital and orbital flights for tourists.
     Ivan Bekey of NASA pointed out in a luncheon talk that tourism is the world's largest industry, with a total impact in the United States alone on the order of $1 trillion a year.
     While surveys have indicated people would be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on trips into space, Bekey said more detailed studies of people likely to go are needed to refine the economics of space tourism.
     Bekey said NASA and the Space Transportation Association (STA) are working together on such a study, with a workshop planned for January and a report due out in April.
     Tom Rogers of the STA said that tourism could lead to new space industries and help restore the public as a constituency in the civilian space program, but a successful tourism industry requires launch costs to be several orders of magnitude lower than today.
     International Space Enterprises and LunaCorp, two companies planning to place rovers on the Moon, are looking to the entertainment industry to pay for their missions.
     LunaCorp's Victoria Beckner presented a plan which called for $365 million in revenues for a $200 million mission, which included funds from television rights, licensing merchandise, and a deal with a theme park.
     The company plans to place two rovers on the Moon in the year 2000. The rovers will travel across the lunar surface and will be controlled by people on Earth, including theme park visitors and Internet users, via telepresence.
     International Space Enterprises, which has already made money in a deal with Pepsi to place a large inflatable version of a Pepsi can outside the Russian Mir space station, has similar plans for rovers. ISE's Mike Simon advocated the entertainment aspects of these rovers, even foreseeing the possibility of games of "laser tag" on the Moon.
     These companies will look to other companies to provide space access at a much lower cost than currently available. Another session of the conference showed that there is no shortage of companies promising just that.
     Mike Kelly, president of Kelly Space and Technology, promoted the Eclipse launch system, an unmanned launcher that won a launch contract from Motorola earlier this month.
     The reusable Eclipse vehicle would take off from a runway towed behind a 747. At an altitude of 20,000 to 40,000 feet, the vehicle would cut its tow line and fire its rocket engines into a suborbital trajectory. An upper stage would later be pushed out of the nose and carry a payload into LEO.
     The Eclipse would be capable of carrying up to two Iridium or Teledesic satellites into LEO, according to Kelly.
     Claiming that the Eclipse is "not a high-risk approach," Kelly said that flight tests with a QF-106 aircraft serving as an Eclipse demonstrator towed behind a C-141 were planned for early next year. The official kickoff for the project is planned for October 28 at the San Bernadino airport.
     A number of other launch systems, from the X-33 and Boeing Sea Launch to Gary Hudson's Roton and Pioneer Rocketplane's Pathfinder spacecraft were also presented at the conference.
     While the emphasis of the conference was on commercial space efforts, attendees gave some consideration of the government's role in aiding those efforts.
     Speaking at a conference luncheon, Congressman George Brown (D-CA), ranking minority member of the House Science Committee, promoted his "investment budget proposal" that would include money for NASA and other government agencies to aid commercial research and development.
     "We can't not afford to make those kind of investments," Brown said, adding that it was vital for NASA to invest in advanced concepts to support future commercial projects.
     Conference attendees also discussed "AlphaTown", a proposal supported by the SFF to turn the International Space Station into a commercial development where companies can buy space for research and even manufacturing products.
     Without private investment in the space station, governments will find it hard to get the money needed for future operations of the station, said Nick Furman of Spacehab, one company interested in the AlphaTown concept.
     Chuck Lauer pointed out that there is a wide range of possible products that could be produced in such an AlphaTown that could be marketed on Earth for a large product.
     "A lot of it is crass, a lot of it is venal," he said, but it still a way to make money in space.
     Ironically, though, the presentation that won the strongest approval from the one hundred-plus attendees was a manned Mars mission proposal that would likely be funded by the government.
     Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" presentation earned a standing ovation from conference attendees near the end of the conference Sunday afternoon.
     Zubrin's presentation gained praise because it represented not a "flags and footprints" mission like the Apollo moon landings, but the chance to establish a permanent presence on Mars.
     "We are not going to Mars to set a new altitude record for the Aviation Almanac," Zubrin told attendees.
     Zubrin equated the frontier potential of Mars with the frontier of the American West in the last century and said that an open frontier was the most pressing social need of society.
     "At the frontier you have an area of challenge," Zubrin said. People on the frontier were creators, not inhabitors, of society, he said.
     In a final challenge to conference attendees, Zubrin said, "Nothing great has ever been accomplished without courage."

Other Conference News:

     The conference hosted a event Friday event to remember the DC-XA, which was destroyed in a crash landing July 31. Jim Muncy of the Space Frontier Foundation described the event as an 'Irish wake for a rocketship." Speakers such as Max Hunter, Pete Conrad, Bill Gaubatz, and Gene Austin, among others, told of the their experience with the DC-XA program. "Long live the DC-X and the Delta Clippers that will follow," Gaubatz said, a sentiment echoed by others in attendance. McDonell Douglas also handed out DC-XA videos, mugs, and caps to conference attendees.
     At the conference banquet a number of SFF awards were handed out. The "Vision to Reality" award went to Spacehab, for developing its commercial space experiment module flown on the space shuttle. The "Vision of the Future" award went to the television show Babylon 5, for its presentation of a future spacefaring civilization with a strong commercial and entrepreneurial aspect. The Service to the Foundation award went to the "March Storm" team led by Charles Miller, who organized two hundred presentations with members of Congress and their staffs during a one-week period in March. Another such project is planned for next year, under the aegis of ProSpace, a separate organizarion spun off from SFF for legal and taxation reasons. A new award, the President's Award, was given to Walt Anderson, the biggest financial contributor to the Foundation to date.
     At a conference reception the SFF announced the creation of a new organization, the Foundation for International Non-Governmental Space (FINDS). The purpose of the organization is to seek out and support "critical path" scientists and organizations to leverage the opening of space. The SFF will handle the operations of FINDS, which currently has $5 million in funds.
     The first project to be supported by FINDS is called "Icebergs and Asteroids". FINDS will support projects that will support the transport of icebergs to places where water is needed, in the belief that the success of these projects will lead investors to support projects to mine asteroids.

     Betty Hull is a literature teacher. She's also a Congressional candidate. And yes, she's pro-space, too.
     Hull, a professor of literature at Harper College outside Chicago and the wife of science-fiction author Frederik Pohl, has quietly made pro-space and pro-science themes a part of her campaign.
     A Democratic candidate for the Illinois 8th District seat in the House of Representatives, Hull is running against longtime Congressman Phil Crane for a seat Crane has held for nearly thirty years.
     The 8th District is located in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in a region of considerable suburban growth. Despite Crane's long reign in the district, Democrats have been making inroads in the district in recent years.
     SpaceViews interviewed Hull last month to find out how her pro-space opinions had shaped her candidacy.
     Hull has used science and specifically space, to teach literature to her students. "I teach science fiction, which I believe bridges the two cultures, to reconcile and heal our society."
     "Teaching science fiction I've become aware of how ignorant many people are of anything a scientific nature," she said. She tried almost anything to make her students, young and old, excited about the future and interested in solving problems.
     She sees space as part of the future, one way to excite students. "Public interest [in the space program] went down for a while, but with the discovery of the bacterial life forms in the meteorite from Mars, I think there is a renewed interest," she said.
     "It a is a job the NSS, NASA, JPL, and other people who are interested in space exploration have to do keep that interest alive."
     She doesn't have a specific agenda for the space program, but does support missions to Mars. "I think [a manned mission to Mars] would be my long-range goal," she said, while acknowledging unmanned missions would be "much cheaper and less risky" in the near-term.
     "I would like to see a commitment to a space plan that is long-range," she added.
     She doesn't want her interest in space to make her a "single-issue candidate", though. "A person who is effective in Congress, he or she needs to have a lot of interests in common issues to get a broad picture," she said. "Until we retire our nation's debt there are a lot of hard decisions to be made."
     Hull is disappointed that the media has not made space a bigger issue in the campaign. "At Balbo Park during the DNC [at a pro-space rally sponsored by the National Space Society] there were television cameras there and I tried to talk to the press who were there and they all seemed like they were bored," she said.
     "I think it [the space program] is not something that lends itself to sound bites, like anything else that is complicated and multifaceted. It doesn't have the sex appeal of other issues, and I think that is unfortunate."
     "I think there is an audience, there are viewers who want to know about such things," she noted.
     When asked why more candidates were not pro-space, or at least openly pro-space, she noted that pro-space candidates often have conflicting ideologies. "Ironically, a lot of the right-wing people who are militaristic support space exploration and technology, for military uses," she commented. "I hope that if we support space it is for peaceful exploration."
     "It makes me a little bit nervous that there will be people in Congress who support space for what I think are the wrong reasons."
     Regardless of the outcome of the election, Hull has a very optimistic view of the future. "Generations from now, we'll be all over the solar system," she said. "Many, many, generations from then, we'll be all over the galaxy, the universe."