Cinco De Mayo

Apparently this is a major major holiday in Mexico and cause for celibration North of the Border too. It celebrates the day the Mexican army beat the French.

So, having had a good week, we gathered on the roof of the Seattle appartment complex, drank Tequilla, ate steaks and had lots of Corona. It was good. I managed to deal with the fact that the oldest of our engineering team here in Seattle was born about the time I left primary school - but I wasn't going to let that upset me.

We then played some Texas Hold 'Em.

I didn't do too well in the first game, I finished 3rd having fallen for a bluff from another player. Once I'd worked him out, I took him out in the second game when he tried it again.

I won the second game with a great, albeit, lucky hand. I drew Ace, 5. I was in the big blind (in other words I had to bet) and got to see the Flop (when they put down the next 3 cards). The flop was 2,3,4 - a crap hand and we started betting - everybody assuming that I was bluffing. The next two cards made a potential high pair and I kept betting, eventually the person with the most chips went all in to take me down. I matched them.

They had 2 pair and reached for the stack.

It's nice to point out that 1,2,3,4,5 is a rather good hand.

I'm not sure I feel confident enough to play Poker in Vegas. But I might consider it.

Space and the Internet Rocketeers...

There has just been a convention for the alternative space crowd which has sparked not inconsiderable controversy. Burt Rutan made a speech over lunch which has upset a lot of the usual suspects like Rand Simberg.   There is a lot of disinformation at work in the space community, there is also rather a lot of fuzzy logic and wishful thinking.  I'm a skeptic about the development of space tourism, or rather, I am a skeptic that space tourism is THE killer app for the development of space and humankind as a space faring species.

Rutan has, in his lunch, upset a lot of the rabid fanboy base.  Good.  It's over due.

Standard regulation will kill the space tourism industry.  A huge percentage of the cost of getting a new aircraft to market is in the flight certification process - the way that the alternative space crowd are addressing this is essentially through a system of Caveat Emptor, basically saying to wanna be passengers, "look, it's risky as hell, you know what you're getting into, but hey! we're going into space."  The logic is that flying, in the early days, was really dangerous and a lot of people died, but it didn't stop people flying.

However, there are some fundemental differences.  Flying is damn useful.  Getting from A to B in a fraciton of the time appealed from day one, passenger services started within a few years of aircraft appearing.  People need to get to places.  However, the development of the mass market for tourism involving aircraft came along a lot later.  It developed using a pre-existing infrastructure.  The aircraft existed and had been built for a specific market, it was good they could also be used for charter flights.  The spanish (and other) fishing villages existed and were just waiting for hoardes of Brits and Germans.  Expanding the infrausture on the ground could be done using available local resources and technology.  The business developed off the back of other very useful businesses.

The problem with space is there are very good reasons to go there and there is an industry supporting those good reasons.  There are less good reasons for people to go there.  I'd quite like to go, but I'm a fan and certainly not deluded enough to think that just because I want to do something, that that translates into a market opportunity.  In fact, if you read the studies conducted into this, the actual size of a market for space travel is nothing like as large as it needs to be.

Burt Rutan understands this.  He understands the industry, and he knows damn well that if you build sub-standard vehicles that kill people, then you'll kill the industry.  While you will attract fan invesotrs like Elon Mush and Paul Allen, you're not going to get to the large venture funds because they too understand this problem.

When Rutan says that he can't crack the orbital problem, that's a bad sign.  

He's upset a lot of his loyal fanbase by speaking the truth.  It is, as I said, about time somebody inside the alt-space community did so.

Ohhh!!!

I've got a copy of Rainbow's End... Well, that's the weekend sorted.