An investment column in Wired News focused yesterday on the emerging space tourism industry. The summary of the column is that opportunities for regular investors are pretty limited: few companies are publicly traded, and others rely on either a single wealthy individual (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack) or have investment requirements beyond the reach of typical angel investors. As I noted in a quote at the end of the article, the VC community hasn’t warmed up to space tourism yet: “Because the capital costs are pretty high, it makes it difficult to get the attention of venture capitalists who are still trying to figure it out. Is this a real market? Is this a real business?” (The one quote I provided the reporter that I wish had been used was something along the lines of, “The best way people can financially support these businesses is by being customers.”)
As it turned out, yesterday the USC Center for Technology Commercialization held a forum in LA titled “Space Billionaires: Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs”. The focus of this event was on the entrepreneurial space industry in general, but one suspects much of the discussion centered around space tourism. The only article I have seen about the event is this SpaceDaily report by Brad Bartz, the “VP Sales – Space.TV Corporation”. Unfortunately, while Mr. Bartz may be a great salesman he’s not much of a writer: this is only a partially-coherent account of the event with an odd fixation on sex in space and impressing “the billionaire next to me.” Hopefully a better account of the event will emerge elsewhere.
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