Innovative Propulsion]

>From Dennis May, responding to Ian Woollard.

Subject: [Starship_Forum] Re: Innovative Propulsion
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 09:04:13 -0600
From: Dennis May
Reply-To: Starship_Forum@yahoogroups.com
To: Starship_Forum@yahoogroups.com

Ian Woollard wrote (11/15):

>A few students recently applied to Boeing for $50,000 to build a cheap
>satellite. Boeing liked their idea, but said they'd need
>$250,000 and promptly gave it to them.

>They spent the money and made the satellite, and its just been launched,
>and it works great. Now all they have to do is work out what to do with the
>other $200,000! [The university plan to spend it over the next 4 years].

>One of the clever bits they did was use an ordinary metal tape measure to
>make a self unfolding antenna. The standard item costs
>$50,000. Theirs: $5.

I am not denigrating the capabilities of
entrepreneurial people to make great gains with
small sums of money. I saw many SBIR projects
which did good work with small sums of money.

My main argument concerns reward versus value.
The largest contract awarded under the
NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project
was under a million dollars and done under
a special congressional bypass of the system.
The rest of the small number of contracts
were between 13K and $120,000. As far as I
could tell most were university projects and
none looked in the least bit promising. What
you aren't seeing is that NASA has gathered
100X this in unseen proposals which are
[effectively] now their intellectual property
for free. The evaluators have expanded their
database of ideas for femto-cents on the dollar.

A wise innovator would not go the route of
give-aways to NASA. We are after all talking
about a technology [if demonstrated] worth
trillions of dollars per year in the long run.
The greatest financial reward you could expect
to gather from involvement in a government
contract of this type wouldn't compare to a
single minute of its value once demonstrated.
Praises will be sung and it will be a great
personal accomplishment but financially it
will be a disaster for you and will only lead
to the further robbery of innovators.

Dennis May