Space Access Update #113 01/04/06
Copyright 2006 by Space Access Society
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We'll get back to talking about the rest of the world shortly, in our
next Update. This issue will be strictly about us, Space Access Society
and its founder and longtime Executive Director, Henry Vanderbilt.
I am going to drop tradition now and forego the editorial "we". The
collective speaking-for-Space-Access-Society "we" will still pop up as
needed, but for reasons that will shortly become clear, I want to get
into practice clearly distinguishing my curmudgeonly personal views from
the carefully considered collective positions of that enigmatic virtual
organization, Space Access Society.
Yes, all you colleagues, fellow-travellers, supporters, and seeing-what-
those-loons-are-up-to-this-time readers out there, after thirteen years
as Chief Cook & Bottle-Washer of this outfit, I am moving on. When I
got into this movement twenty years ago, my main ambition wasn't to do
policy and politics - I wanted to build spaceships. Policy and politics
was a means to an end. The time has arrived for me personally to go
help bend metal and burn propellant. More on that in a bit.
Somewhat paradoxically (at least if you've assumed all there is to SAS
is the highly visible bit, me) this will mean that SAS's Updates will
come out more regularly, its website will be better maintained, and its
annual Space Access conference (April 20th-22nd in Phoenix Arizona, we
should have a hotel contract to announce within days) will continue to
improve and grow.
So, how does SAS achieve these things while losing its Fearless Leader?
What happens to SAS, post-Henry? We, the ongoing confidential and
somewhat arbitrarily self-selected discussion group I will be handing
executive authority back to, have spent a lot of time thrashing that
question in recent weeks, and come to a number of conclusions.
First, we don't think it practical to find one person to replace me.
The list of people we know with the variety of skills involved willing
to do the job for (in a good year) something approaching part-time
minimum wage is, uh, short. The danger of losing focus and diluting or
diverting our viewpoint in going over to a traditional non-profit with
fulltime paid staff seems acute; none of us has the time and energy to
guarantee such against agenda drift, bylaw-twiddling, donor-catering,
and other such time-honored diversions of space activist energies.
Second, we've concluded that SAS does need to continue. Its key
products - its optimistic viewpoint that radically cheaper space
transportation is both highly desirable and possible without radical new
technology, its hard-headedly realistic views on how to actually get
there from here, and its annual conference where players in this new
field get together, brainstorm, trade information, and make deals - are
useful enough not to abandon lightly. The approach we've been pushing
all these years is finally gaining acceptance and showing signs of
working, but we've seen the revolution "unstoppable" before. It's too
soon to declare victory and throw a dissolution party.
The answer we've come up with is to go even more minimalist-virtual than
we already are - to identify the essential tasks, slice them up among
our various selves finely enough so we can all go on making our various
livings, and carry on. The result should be an improvement in most
things we do. I've been more than a little distracted in recent years,
and have tended to let slide all but the highest-priority items. Again,
more on that in a bit.
The chief downside we can see is that absent a single executive able to
make policy decisions on the spot, we are likely to move more slowly and
deliberately in anything short of a major crisis. This is not
necessarily a bad thing, we think. In general we think being right
trumps being first in this field - we're in this for the long haul.
Practical details: I will be winding down my involvement and handing
off various slices of this job over the coming weeks.
- SAS will stop accepting donations and paid memberships immediately -
the annual conference should cover all our reduced expenses for now.
Our - my - heartfelt thanks to all the people who've supported SAS with
membership dues and donations over the years. We couldn't have gotten
this far without you. As for new memberships, Space Access Society is a
state of mind as much as it is anything. If you believe radically
cheaper space access is both hugely important and near-term possible,
you're one of us. Pay your dues by doing what you can to advance the
cause as the chance arises.
- Contact with Space Access Society will be via email; the office phone
will be gone shortly. There will at some point be several email boxes
on the www.space-access.org website for various departments - Press
Inquiries, Conference Questions, Letters To The Editor, Mail-List
Signup, and others as may become needed. For now use the
space.access@space-access.org email for all of these. We will retain
the paper mailbox at 5515 N 7th St #5-348, Phoenix AZ 85014, but it will
be checked infrequently other than right before the Space Access
conference, as we intend to use it mainly for conference registrations
and business. All other contacts are best made via email.
- I will continue to work for SAS in one capacity: Organizing the
annual Space Access conference. That's the one part of this job I can't
hand off right away - there are a lot of non-obvious details involved in
putting a conference together successfully - so I will end up doing it
for a while longer. But I will be SAS's Conference Manager only. I
will not speak for SAS in public or make on-the-spot policy decisions
for SAS anymore. Come the conference I will likely stick to technical
and schedule work while someone else MC's. If you don't like your
speaking timeslot or Registration has lost your badge, talk to me, but I
will no longer be the go-to guy on SAS policy questions. SAS will come
up with official spokespersons when needed, but in general, the SAS
policy contact point will be the website email.
A question that's bound to come up, sooner more likely than later:
Impartiality in running the conference. I will soon be working for a
player in this industry. My soon-to-be new boss approves of the
conference enough that he's agreed to allow me to go on running it on
the side, and will even donate some of my company time as a form of
sponsorship of the conference. Other companies are invited (and
encouraged - easy terms, no money down, talk to me and we'll make a
deal!) to be conference sponsors also. All sponsors will be listed
equally in the program and in all publicity. If anyone has a problem
with scheduling, I will as always do my best to work it out
satisfactorily. And if anyone has a problem with who is or is not
invited to speak at the conference, I can but assure them that I will as
always do my best to put together as interesting, informative, and
useful a conference as possible, that I will under the circumstances
bend over backwards to see that dissenting views are represented fairly,
and that all such issues will have been run past SAS's core
decisionmakers; none will be the result of my prejudices alone.
Why Now?
It has been over thirteen years since I and a group of like-minded fans
of Radically Cheaper Space Transportation founded Space Access Society,
in order to promote development of RCST, ASAP. We had come to realize
we were a tiny minority, both in believing RCST possible in the near
term, and in having a coherent program to achieve it. We had also
realized we could be a tiny minority and still be effective, given sound
ideas and appropriate tactics. Minority pressure-group tactics, plus
"There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets
the credit"... But important issues were falling through the cracks
because we all had lives and jobs; our viewpoint needed to be more
consistantly and persistantly put forth if it was to have any chance of
catching on.
Space Access Society was our answer. After I'd been agitating for
*someone* to do it for over a year, I ended up being the one who got
laid off and suddenly had the time, back in 1992. I called for
volunteers, eveyone else took one step back, and there I was...
The intent of SAS has never been to empire-build; in my tenure I've
always kept to the minimum structure necessary to do the job. Indeed,
when I first started, SAS was designed to be disposable, on the theory
that in five years we'd have succeeded, SAS would no longer be needed,
and I could get a life again. Hah. I have, ahem, learned a bit about
patience and persistance since then.
It's just as well that I'd never forgotten how to live like a starving
student - things were tight. Most everything we could have done to
raise substantial extra money involved compromising the mission, doing
things I hated and/or wasn't good at, or both. We more or less got by.
But a few years ago, I decided I had better not go on ignoring how deep
into a high-interest hole I'd fallen. So I started working my way back
out, which cut seriously into the time and energy I could put into SAS.
I like to think I've still managed to cover the most urgent essentials
since then, but I haven't been happy with how I've been doing this job
for a while now.
I recently realized that I've personally outlasted the entire L-5
Society, that it has been one hell of an interesting ride with any
number of truly fine people, but that I am seriously overdue to move on.
SAS has become overly identified with me in any case; it's always been
far more than one individual. And finally, after twenty years in the
trenches, I'm exhausted with politics. I look forward to backing off
from the ongoing policy thrash and bending metal instead.
Did I mention I'll be going to work for a rocket company in the near
future? I'll leave it to my new employers to make whatever fuss about
that they think appropriate when the time comes.
It's been a long strange road for the six-year-old boy who, watching one
of the Mercury-Atlas countdowns on the family black-and-white, heard the
announcers say they threw the $10 million rocket away every flight, and
thought to himself "they're never going to spend that much to send me up
there". Twenty-four years later, I started working to change all that.
Forty-four years later, I have a chance to go build affordable
spaceships. I'm going for it.
God bless you all, especially those of you who'll go on laboring in the
political vineyards. Nobody appreciates what you do more than I.
Henry Vanderbilt
7:56 pm mst, January 4th, 2006
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Space Access Society
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space.access@space-access.org
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein