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Paul Allen Confirmed as SpaceShipOne's Sponsor
Shafe writes "Space.com confirmed suspicions that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was the secret investor in Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, which completed a successful supersonic flight on the same day as the centennial of flight. Allen hopes Rutan's ship will win the $10 million X-Prize to help kickstart private manned space flight."
This is not the first time Mr. Allen has contributed to the common good: google link
Good for him. If only more plutocrats thought the same way.
Turkey Guts,BTW.
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I guess he plans to blast the Trailblazers into space so they won't cause him anymore problems.
I hadn't before heard of this Microsoft of which you speak.
Oh. Damn that's good to know. The Microsoft co-founder, eh?
If history is anything to go by, that contraption won't be worth a thing until SpaceShipThreePointOne is built.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I wonder if Paul Allen will want to be the first Private citizen into space with the first privately built space ship.
It is good to see people with his kind of wealth putting it to work for society. The benefits of a private space market will be....well more benefits than you could imagine. (sorry about the star wars thing) If his reason for doing this is just to get to be 'first inspace in a privately owned vehicle' well then, I wish him the best of luck!
I'm personally rooting for Armadillo Aerospace, which has John Carmack's involvement. He's got some great comments on his news page - feels much more open and less corporate than some of the other X-Prize contenders.
Well if they use windows on the operatoring system for the Microsoft MicroShip, when it gets hacked as an SMTP relay, it will give new meaning to Chuck Yeager's phrase for the mercury astronauts "Spam in a can"
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
I thought that it said Alien confirmed as sponsor. And that would have been good news.
It's kind of amazing, in the last two days we've had a couple of interesting space stories, both involving about the same sum. Two more 'space tourists' are going to fly to the ISS in Soyuz capsules, for $20MM. Paul Allen is revealed as the sponser of Rutan's effort -- total cost, about $20MM.
So, where one person gets to go into space, by himself, atop a converted Russian ICBM -- somebody with a little more sand kickstarts an entire private space industry. The tourists have only their memories, while Allen will have his own spaceship!
Very inspiring, Mr Allen.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
that might explain why they used Visual Basic naming conventions.
"It is good to see people with his kind of wealth putting it to work for society."
They all do, it's just that most of it isn't high-profile or 'cool' stuff like space travel.
Wealthy people don't stuff their mattresses full of cash or have a Scrooge McDuck vault where they hoard coin and bill, or in any other way keep it totally removed from the economy.
No, instead what you find is that their money is socked away in investment portfolios, mutual funds, annuities, or their own businesses as capital investments. All that money gets invested somewhere in society, whether it's in government bonds, other companies, loans, etc etc etc.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Umm, "much more moral"? WTF d00d?
You have $10B. You wanna make the world a better place.
Scenario 1:: Give $10000 to 1,000,000 third-worlders. If you want that to last for 25-30 years, your million people will have $300-400 per year. They will have running water, but the vast majority of those million people will be living in mud huts and abject squalor. At the end of your 25 years, most will have reproduced at least once, leaving you with 2,000,000 people still living in squalor.
Number of lives improved: 1,000,000 for 25 years.
Funds remaining: $0.00
Choice 2: Drop $9B on a development programme to reduce lift costs to orbit from $10000/pound to $100/pound. Invest $1B in companies that have neat ideas, like doing science (which leads to more technology), strip-mining the moon or asteroids (reducing environmental loads on earth) for metals and silicon for solar cells. 25 years later, you've doubled your money (and can feed the 2,000,000 third-worlders that Mister Morality left behind if you so choose), and six billion people now have practically free electrical power and consequently, pure water as extracted from seawater through desalination plant, also becomes too cheap to meter.
Number of lives improved: 6,000,000,000 permanently improved.
Funds Remaining: Very probably more funds than you started with. So you can fund the next big thing, whatever that might be.
And as an added bonus: If you still wanna help 10000 third-worlders because they're somehow a very special bunch of third-worlders (as opposed to the other 2-3 billion of them), just build them their very own hollowed-out asteroid for $850M, and use $150M (10000 people * 150 pounds * $100/pound) to fly them to it.
Some of Gates' "charitable" actions are Good Things, such as his funding of medical research. Others are props for the monopoly, such as giving away free-as-in-beer Microsoft licenses to schools so that the kids never hear about penguins.
But to pretend that "charity" is somehow intrinsically more moral than funding the development of cool technology for private gain is utter and complete bunk.
Damn near every improvement in your quality of life over the past 100 years has come from people just trying to make a buck by building a better mousetrap.
You go, Paul Allen. And don't let the whining moralists get you down. Investing in private space development is one of the most moral acts a human being can perform.
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1. $9bn will not "reduce lift costs to orbit from $10000/pound to $100/pound". NASA funding was ~$14bn in 2002 alone, and you can't increase efficiency that much, even in cuckoo land, unless you have a very good idea?
...six billion people now have practically free electrical power and consequently, pure water as extracted from seawater through desalination plant. I'm sorry, but unless the electricity is beamed and desalinated water materialised you still need low level electricity distribution and water transportation. Production costs are low compared to costs of transportation.
2. 1bn is way way way below the invested amounts in NASDAQ, even on IPO, full of tech companies that have neat ideas.
3.
I'm all for teaching people to fish rather than giving them a fish, but although $10bn is obscene for an individual, is is small fish on the global investment scale of things. Cool technology is cool, but it is not a cure-all, it is a part of a means to an end, but only a part. Nor will space-travel/exploitation be a cure-all for world poverty et al, low level solutions need to be made, the UN needs more money, development charities need more money, developing countries need more money (or be freed from their debt, but this is another discussion). Bringing back trillions of tons of ore from asteriods will make no difference if the price of ore is immediately depressed and people from developing countries still have no direct water supply, still have no electricity pylons to their village, or still have inadequate access to education. Old fashion engineering and logistics are the only things that can solve this.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
"Bill Gates does not run... blah blah blah"
/. rants. Even if that has some basis in fact (which it could), it doesn't change the fact that countless people have benefitted with their lives from the grants. And it doesn't stand to reason that Gates would say "Hey, here's $200 million. But first, sign this $4 million contract." I'm no math major, but that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
You're right. It's only his $26 BILLION (sorry, $6.2 billion is just what they've given out so far) that comprises the endowment.
"Mr. Gates did not get on the philanthropic exploits... blah blah blah"
So? Just as I don't know "the amount of money or time" that you've committed to charities, you don't have a clue as to what Mr. Gates' motives are, and the smarmy, self-important intimation that you do is part of what angers me. And "guilt-tripping"? Is that a joke? Bill Gates can either be an emotionless corporate hard-heart, hell-bent on world domination, or he can be swayed by the "guilt" laid on him by people. He can't be both. Pick one.
And does he "go around to countries asking them" for contracts? I'd like to see any evidence of that beyond anecdotal
Speaking of not making sense, let's examine part of what you're saying:
"He doesn't run the Foundation."
"He does run the Foundation and uses it to get Microsoft contracts."
Huh?
"You don't know me... blah blah blah."
You're right. And you don't know Bill Gates. Maybe you should take some of your own advice, and not speculate as to the intentions of another person.
But, given the size of the entire endowment, I think it's safe to guess you (just like I and most of the rest of the population of the world) haven't given 56% of their net worth to charity. That, unlike your assumptions, has at least some statistical validity to it (somewhere... I'm not about to look up average charitable donations by household as a percentage of income, but I'll betcha 50 bucks it's a whole shitload less than 56%. Feel free to look it up, though, if you think that statistical assumption is wrong).
Either way, I suppose I don't really care what you donate. I think it's absurd for you dismiss the significance of the donations as being executed for personal reasons of ego, while ignoring the benefits they've caused -- regardless of their source. I don't think it's any better of you to criticize Mr. Gates like you do than it would be for you to say to me "Bah, whatever chartitable donations you've made have only been to make yourself feel good and only for your benefit" or something to that effect. And that'd get me wicked-pissed off.