Hello, supporters of Space Entrepreneurship and Investment!

Welcome to 2022.

While many in the northern hemisphere think of winter as a time of slowing down for a bit,  nothing could be further from the truth here at at the Center’s Florida base.  We’re making all sorts of new plans, offerings, and changes for 2022.  

A lot of these changes will be made on-the-fly, as it were, particularly where it comes to the CSCF.space website, adding new content, beefing up existing content, and making it all easier to navigate.  (This is, of course, a naked ploy to get you to come back more frequently, but I am serious in the intent!)

APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN FOR ALL-VIRTUAL NEWSPACE BPC

We still have about 10 days or so to apply to be a Finalist at the upcoming All-Virtual NewSpace Business Plan Competition, to be held as part of “Conversations for the Future”, February 18th. The Foundation for the Future is sponsoring, as always a $5000 Grand Prize for the best presentation pitch.  Plus you also get some great coaching by our team of accomplished pros, and exposure to a whole new audience, including many in the investor community.  Check out the links below!  Applying is easy. Open to all, around the world. 

https://cscf.space/newspace-bpc-rules

https://cscf.space/nsbpc-application-winter-2022

ANNOUNCING OUR FIRST JUDGE FOR THE 2/18/22 BPC

The Center is thrilled to announce our first Judge for the Feb 18th event is none other than Dennis Stone, from NASA’s Commercial LEO Development Program Office.  From his bio:

“Dennis Stone has over four decades of experience, including 35 years at NASA, in space commercialization, public/private partnerships, program management, space technology, and international relations.  He helped manage over $1.2B in investments by NASA in commercial space capabilities.

He is Project Executive for the $400M Commercial Destinations Free Flyer project in NASA’s Commercial LEO Development Program.  In this role, he manages NASA’s funding and technical support to companies developing commercial space stations to eventually replace the International Space Station (ISS).  Prior to this he led Collaborations on Commercial Space Capabilities partnerships which provided NASA’s technical support to the SpaceX Starship, ULA Vulcan/Centaur 5, Northrup Grumman Mission Extension Vehicle, and Final Frontier space suits.  

He helped lead NASA’s successful Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) partnerships to develop commercial cargo capabilities to LEO. He chaired the business committee in both COTS investment rounds which invested nearly $800M in the SpaceX Falcon 9/Dragon and Orbital Sciences Antares/Cygnus.  He also helped select and manage NASA’s first $50M investment Commercial Crew partnerships.  

Prior to COTS, Mr. Stone worked in the ISS Program on system engineering, avionics, international relations, risk management, and technology development.  Before joining NASA, he worked for McDonnell Douglas, Ford Aerospace, and Rockwell in civil and commercial space program engineering and management.  

He serves as volunteer President of World Space Week Association, which coordinates UN-declared World Space Week, celebrated globally each October 4-10.  He has dual Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Hawaii in electrical engineering and physics. “

NEW VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAM ANNOUNCED, FOCUSING ON SPACE STATIONS AND LUNAR INFRASTRUCTURE

One of the Center’s Board members, Michael Laine, is creating a new virtual conference called “Better Futures”,  to discuss specific aspects of creating new and more cost-effective commercial space stations, and lunar settlement infrastructure. 

As you know, accessibility to space has always been limited by financial and social capital constraints.  Consider that modern day rocketry and International Space Station maintenance costs $150 billion dollars to support a team of 3-13 people and has taken roughly 20 years to build.Despite such constraints, because of our collective will and common curiosities, we have been able to get this far.  

By building a place for free exchange of information and ideas, we can abandon the tradition of gatekeeping space itself and space-based knowledge, and in so doing, unlock our global access to future solutions and opportunities that are presently hidden by time-consuming, bureaucratic procedures. “Better Futures” wishes to create a viable alternative to this bureaucratic process, resulting, one day soon, in a giant space station costing a fraction of the time and financial resources currently being deployed. 

Better Futures has created this conference to facilitate discussion and accumulate strategies – a necessary first step for any grand idea.  This conference will allow you to workshop alongside enthusiasts and space industry professionals to participate in consideration of the various components to build a supportive social structure and physical CisLunar infrastructure.  This conference is the first organized collision of the minds to coordinate and organize ideas necessary for a space station and we intend to lead the world in improving quality of life both in space and on Earth.  

They are hosting our first event Friday & Saturday, February 4&5, 2022, to gather space enthusiasts and professionals for a mastermind gathering.

About the Better Futures conference 

Better Futures is an organization born from the parent company, LiftPort. Since September 2020, we have hosted, curated, and organized 16 events with 200+ speakers for 1000+ space professionals as a service to our 5 current clients.

Better Futures is hosting a new monthly and quarterly series that will pioneer the discussion on our latest frontier.

The Future: 2035 is a quarterly series that will allow participants to track and predict changes amongst social strata as well as technological changes so that we can adjust our sails accordingly. Broken into 5-year epochs, we attempt to characterize and map out what changes we believe lie ahead in technology and society.

Space Capital, Finance, and Money is a quarterly series that assesses the financial needs to build public, unsubsidized space infrastructure. This series will also track changes amongst the financial industry sector in order to determine how they will affect space accessibility and our ability to support 15,000 people transitioning to the CisLunar economy and environment.

Lunar Development, Settlement, and Settlers is a quarterly series that will support discussions on how to establish the equitable development of CisLunar space. We will consider questions such as “who will go to space” and “when they will go to space” in order to create a template for the future generations that will adapt to our new domain with purpose.

The final cornerstone of our programming is the space station itself, which is the actual infrastructure that will support the lives of those who choose to live, work and play on-orbit. In order to be able to build such a life-support system, this monthly series will work in conjunction with the alternating quarterly series to review the hardware, business, outreach, and framework requirements for this extraterrestrial environment.

You can click the link below to sign up.  Ticket price is $45 for this event, but if you use the discount code “itsonlyabitoffun” at checkout, you’ll get 2/3 off!  Your support also supports the Center, so thanks in advance!

https://www.betterfutures.space/the-star-fleet-enterprise.html#/

Enjoy the rest of your winter, and stay tuned for more developments and news from the “space-is-business” community.

Thomas Andrew Olson
Co-Founder and Chair

Center for Space Commerce and Finance

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